We are declaring war on sourceless edits and vow to purge all of them!

This is great news for you the reader, as from now on we are way more stringent on sourcing.

To that end, we have brought back patrolling – a MediaWiki function that creates a queue of all edits where special users have to resolve the edit, kinda like resolving a mod queue item. Users who have shown interest in patrolling will be able to see this queue and resolve it.

From now on, this group will REVERT sourceless edits and claims, not to punish editors, but to remove unsourced claims from public view until they can be sourced.

Nobody will be spared: admins and patrollers have to have their edits patrolled as well by someone else. If we don’t source, they can revert.

I’m very excited to announce this change that will improve our sourcing and authority as a trustworthy encyclopedia. We have allowed sourceless edits for too long, and this ends starting tomorrow.

“Common sense” claims will be allowed without sources so as not to drown a page in sources. These include, for example, a person’s name or date of birth. Broad claims to introduce a topic, such as “The revolution brought many changes to the country” are also allowed without sources as it’s a broad, vague claim that is obviously true. But if an edit said “the revolution brought many changes to social classes in the country”, they would have to source that.

We expect our sourcing policy will evolve with experience as we try this new plan.

Background info (you don’t have to read that)

Earlier today, we had to ban a long-time editor after they admitted on Reddit that they essentially used the wiki to promote their own project, which is fine and we discussed this with them. But they admitted they made joking articles just to mess with us. We banned them for this and removed all their edits. This included an entire article they wrote without sources. Essentially, they said we were idiots for believing they were being good faith.

This person had been with us for over a year and a half, and while they were an anti-revisionist, they had never given us trouble. We did have suspicions once, but nothing came of it after investigation. It was a shock to the editorship that they would betray

This event prompted us to change our sourcing policy. It already needed patrols, and so we finally went ahead with the plan in record time: less than 6 hours from start to finish, from deciding on the new policy (what it will do, what it will look like, etc) to finding volunteers and setting up the permissions. They are now, at this moment, making their way through the recent changes.

We are also discussing our policy regarding non-MLs on ProleWiki from now on. Every time we’ve let a non-ML on, they’ve abused our generosity and turned out to be opportunists. We let that user promote their group because we believe their group has an interesting project, and we like to give back to editors by letting them self-promote as ProleWiki is all volunteer work. We prefer to build bridges than burn them.

It’s not like we let in non-MLs, but we might have looked at their account request seriously if they said they weren’t MLs. With that I really just want to instantly reject them if they say anything other than ML lol. It’s not policy yet though, we’re discussing it.

Anyway, evidently some people don’t feel like building things together and somehow it’s never the MLs that are being difficult. It’s always non-MLs that want to appropriate PW for themselves.

It’s good in a way though, it shows we’re punching above our weight and people are taking us seriously. We’re gonna keep being ML as per our principles and we’re gonna let revisionists and opportunists be scared of a growing power that calls them out and doesn’t bow to them.