[Wikipedia-l] Marxists.org

[Fred Bauder]

At 01:35 PM 8/12/02 -0700, Jimbo wrote:
>The fine communists over at marxists.org have approached me about the
>possibilities of sharing content.  They have a lot of content that's
>under the GNU FDL, and they've expressed an interest in putting it
>into the wikipedia.

>They appear to be interested in non-bias, and to understand that
>people would want to make modifications in order to make things
>satisfactory to a wide audience.  They appear to have a genuine
>interest in contributing solid knowledge.
>
>I'm just saying this now to invite everyone to go take a look at
>their site, so that we can have intelligent comments for them.

Wikipedia may have met its match here. Marxists are onery. Thing is,
though, any one from there who wants to come here and write articles is
perfectly welcome. But editing and changes to what they write (or
especially to what they copy from their site to here) is not going to go
down well with them, no matter what they may say in advance.

Many articles are not encyclopedic in nature but lexigraphic and focused
around jargon, see:

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/a/c.htm#actuality

So the problem exists of smoothly integrating Marxist knowledge into both
mainstream and other sectarian knowledge. I think that might be a useful
exercise for all concerned.

I have observed over a long life people in various labor and social
situations reinventing various idea and techniques which have a history in
Marxist thought, but because they either have no access to such thought or
don't realize what it contains aren't able to use that history in their
current activities. So the information is important if it can somehow
conveniently accessed.

Much of their site is devoted to archives of Marxist literature.

I note that they at least make a stab at trying to deal with the problem of
sectarianism in their rules, i.e. no one group, no matter how hard they try
to pack the ballot box, gets total say. As wikipedia now stands we have no
such mechanism and limited expertise in that area. An experienced Marxist
can rather easily sort out advocates of various positions. That sort of
sorting out of contributers is not really contemplated here.

Anyway, fascinating initiative...

Fred Bauder