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