Many of the works I've seen on the ProleWiki library do not have a link to an ebook version. Even the source pages often do not.
I could find ebooks of some works on other places on the internet, but often the translations are different or they're missing the footnotes found on the ProleWiki versions.

I tried to convert a couple of them to epubs by downloading the "printable version" provided by ProleWiki and running it through Calibre, but the result is always broken.

Does anyone have suggestions for people who prefer to use ereaders?

What do I mean by this? Well, this is how The German Ideology used to look on ProleWiki:

https://en.prolewiki.org/index.php?title=Library%3AThe_German_ideology&oldid=85037

And this is what it looks like now: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_German_ideology

In the 'before', the book was imported entirely on a single page. This is how all books on prolewiki are.

In the after, the book is on a single page, but you can also use the integrated table of contents to navigate directly inside a chapter subpage. E.g.: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_German_ideology/The_essence_of_the_materialist_conception_of_history_Social_being_and_social_consciousness

This gives readers choice as to how they want to read books.

We have to run a script on every library page individually so it'll take some time and new books will probably lag behind before they're split, but this is a net positive overall

Also reminder to press '0' on your keyboard (desktop only) when using prolewiki to enable reading mode, and check the gear icon in the sidebar for customization/accessibility options.

The first and only online copy of this book(s) made available by a comrade who digitized all three volumes. We gratefully offered to rehost for them.

I haven't read it myself but they've shared some excerpts and it sounds like a very good read from a based (20th century) author, which is a rarity from terf island.

This is the revised edition.

I have finally gone around to implementing the much-awaited reading mode. This is a distraction-free reading mode that basically removes everything but the text.

Combined with the settings (the gear icon which not enough people use tbh), you can now tailor your reading experience to pretty much the level you need. Font-size, font type (serif, sans), theme (light-dark-sepia), and even page width.

For now it's kind of an easter egg because you have to know to press the 0 key, but it allows us to test the new mode and start deploying it.

Press 0 again to cancel it, or just refresh the page - it doesn't save on purpose. Reading mode only works on desktop because it kind of already exists on mobile.

It also adds a line cursor that highlights the line you're pointing over, to help you keep track of where you are on the page, or if you need it for accessibility reasons.

The goal for the reading mode is "a reading experience so comfortable you will start reading one word and suddenly hours have passed". I don't know if we'll achieve that but we'll get as close to it as possible.

It still needs some fiddling with the colors (and so does the sepia theme) so you don't have to tell me about that lol, but if you have ideas or stuff you've always wanted to have in a reading mode or similar, lmk.

From the gear icon you can now select a new sepia mode that I made this morning.

It doesn't save across pages yet for tests, but you can try it out by going into the gear icon in the sidebar and selecting sepia. To cancel it, just refresh the page.

Feel free to try it out across pages and let me know what you think of it or if we missed anything. It's still subject to change, under testing period, etc. but I think it's almost there.

Attached picture is sepia as part of a mockup for a "reading mode" without distractions. This is not implemented yet but will be the next step.

update: sepia mode now saves across pages and works perfectly well. There is a bit of a flash when you load a page with it on for a second as it loads the theme, which we will probably move to PHP eventually so that doesn't happen anymore. But you can use it, it's out in v1.

I realize that I don't use prolewiki too often for reading because, let's be honest, there's a lot of clutter on a web page that you don't have when reading a physical book.

To help remedy that, the first phase of my plan is to create a "reading mode" that will remove all clutter from the page and basically let you read uninterrupted. In later phases, as skills and software permit, I will also look at saving your place in the page in some way (maybe a % read bar so that you know where to scroll to when you come back), AND, one thing I've always wanted to do, allow users to highlight text and add notes locally so they can annotate PW books for themselves.

But one thing at a time.

For the time being, this is what the reading experience looks like on desktop (mobile is already pretty clean so I'm not touching that):

And this is a barebones version of it, with just text basically:

We can of course then think about potentially making it more interesting (maybe doing a sepia mode to reduce blue light, or allowing the gear icon to come back so people can open dark mode or change width) but that's extras on top. I also have to think about how you'd get that mode on and off.

For the time being though, is this something you feel like you'd use or prefer over the 'vanilla' interface when reading on ProleWiki? Would it make you more inclined to use prolewiki to read books on?

Does anybody have a source for this claim?

ProleWiki has been made aware that there is a severe lack of ML theory in Japanese. To that end, we are interested in opening a Japanese-language instance of ProleWiki and are looking for people to join this project. So far we have one, maybe 2 interested comrades.

In the first phase, we are interested in translating, proofreading and then uploading marxist theory on the new instance.

Down the line you can also of course make other content pages for this instance, such as party pages, but maintaining a language instance is a lot of work so that's why we've reduced it to the most fundamental aspects (the three tasks above). We can set up the instance for you and explain how to upload books (it's really easy once you got the hang of it), I just need to know if some people are interested and able to put in some time for this.

Pro-tip: you can easily translate whole books with AI (I can explain how if you join the discord, it'll be easier to do this with everyone). But you still need to proofread it, especially with a language like Japanese. But at least it cuts down on like 90% of the work.

If you're interested --> join the discord and mention this post in vetting (you will still have to answer the questions) https://discord.gg/ZQTBNRU9v5

Edit: we are back online for now. Files are not in danger, we have daily backups. It's a problem with the host. We're exploring our options. Switching hosts is not super easy when it comes to VPS and it's hard to find one that's as cost-effective as what we had.

This was not planned but it's nothing worrying. I will hold off on providing more information until we can say so for sure. Don't know when the website will be back but hopefully it shouldn't be too long. We're not going anywhere!

as promised here are the results

This is the correct one. I wanted to add a few more granular options

joking, the actual april fools is making you think we would actually do this

but it would be pretty funny and give us some feedback on how correct we are to be semi-closed.

This is something I tell our editors often but if you have skills that are not purely wiki maintaining (e.g. writing entries), there's a 90% chance we can find something you can work on. This works for your hobbies too or stuff you'd like to experiment with.

And it's not capitalist work, it's as anti-capitalist as it gets. You don't even need to have a clear idea of what you'd like to be doing. You can tell us what you like to do (e.g. editing videos, doing stats work, managing a community) and we will probably be able to put our braincells collectively together to come up with something that uses that skill & would be beneficial for the project. Then you're free to do that or not. There's no deadlines or product to deliver. If it fails, it fails (though of course we'd rather it works). We don't gatekeep people because they don't have the right skills or diplomas, instead we work with them as facilitators so they can bring their project to the website.

The beauty of this project is that it's a safe place to learn and perfect skills of all sorts (and also learning with comrades, because we learn together and not in isolation), which you can then apply in your hobbies, your organizational work, or at your job. There's never any critical failure. We try stuff out and if it doesn't work out, then we revert.

Most of the design theory I learned was from deploying features on ProleWiki and managing the editorial team (loosely speaking), and mostly through practice.

Of course as a collaborative encyclopedia the tradeoff is that you do work with other people and can't do everything in isolation. We're big on facilitation (it's a real thing) instead of barking out orders. You may be a team leader for a project if you want to try and learn some organizational skills but we see them more as coordinators, basically the person who knows where everything is at at all times and can coordinate information to the right target. Idk just google facilitator they explain it on wikipedia lol.

We learn from practice and practice informs theory, and theory lets us do correct practice. It's the perfect sandbox to practice in without too much commitment or chance of messing up. The other beauty of ProleWiki is that we have a large audience already (>1000 daily visits) and a team of more than 20 active editors. This means you don't start from scratch and can quickly see the results of your work. This type of data is invaluable because it lets you know in 24 hours if your implementation was successful or not.

But if you want to test the waters you can comment here (or DM me if you'd like to keep it private) with ideas for stuff you've wanted to try and or learn and I can probably come up with some ways we could let you experiment with that on ProleWiki.

Thanks to deepseek (based on chatgpt code lol), I was able to fix the hyperlink button in headings. If you remember they existed for a time but didn't show up properly, so we removed them. This is now all fixed.

When you click on this icon, you're taken to the section and it inputs it in your adress bar for quick sharing (it doesn't hijack your clipboard automatically because I hate when apps do that).

AND, we were also able to fix the table of content scrolling at the same time. You might not remember this OG bug where the first time you clicked on a TOC heading you wouldn't be taken there, you'd need to click a second time. This has been fixed at the same time.

I'm interested if you think this is useful and you used the hyperlink icons the first time around. I wanted to incorporate them on ProleWiki because it's something I do use (especially in book clubs).

We're doing another survey to gauge feedback, take it here: https://framaforms.org/prolewiki-reader-survey-jan-2025-1736844728

It'll stay online probably for no more than a week.

Thanks!

To expand our operations, we will have to eventually scale our storage. To simply pay for a better VPS server is not scalable and very costly for us

The way forward is to pay for external storage I believe. Do you have any experiences with cloud storage you could share with us? We're probably opting for Amazon S3 based on what they are able to deliver to us

For inspiration, look at our Marxism portal: https://en.prolewiki.org/index.php?title=Portal%3AMarxism

Just like with Bakhmut, the pro-UA wikipedia editors couldn't bring themselves to write Russian victory. There were a lot of proposals to close off the article "Battle of Vuhledar" as a Ukrainian victory, and then write a new article "Vuhledar Offensive" where Russia won. The cope is unreal, but it looks like there are veteran Wikipedia editors who are sticklers for correctness and completeness and are not taking any shit.

If you don't know, it took several months after Bakhmut fell for Wikipedia to reflect that. The cope was that no reputable sources said "Ukraine lost Bakhmut" and therefore it didn't happen, despite Russians moving past Bakhmut and assaulting villages to the West of it. Talk page Lots of threads are missing, there were at least a dozen discussing the issue of "Russian victory" back and forth. Is there an archive?