CriticalResist8

the last lib headcannon that I'm up to (though it's a few years old by now so probably out of date) is that pyongyang is where all regime connoisseurs live and the rest of the country is where the slaves are forced to. then they toil for the aristocracy that lives in pyongyang. You know, the country where everyone is a slave but also 3 million citizens are for some reason part of the nobility or whatever. You definitely need 3 million nobles to run a country of 26 million.

Confuse your enemy with Juche Necromancy. Sun Tzu talked about this.

Convenient how DPRK, Iran and Russia (The "Axis of Evil") are all allying together against the one last European democracy!

Note that anon edits log your IP address, unfortunately we can't change that so I recommend a VPN or similar if you want. All claims also need to be sourced except for stuff that we can reasonably expect people won't bother checking (such as dates of birth, nationality or full names).

Yeah, anons can edit main wiki pages and the edits go into a moderation queue where trusted editors can approve or reject. It's quite new, I think from some time this summer?

Then the application form should be to write a wiki article for something that doesn’t have one yet [...]

Certainly, but like I explained in my previous comment once editors get access they can write about anything they want and we kinda have to trust that they know what they're talking about, or spend time and effort patrolling all their edits and discussing if it's factual or not and if we should remove or not. We need to know as much as we can about them which involves all sorts of topics.

Why should I (or anyone else for that matter) have to answer them again?

I meant specifically the Lemmygrad questions, sorry for the confusion. The Lemmygrad vetting questions haven't changed since we first started account vetting actually, except for the anti-AI question that's a copy and paste task. ProleWiki is completely independent from Lemmygrad as a project and while we can use someone's Lemmygrad profile (or other profiles) to help expedite their account request if they tell us the info, they still have to answer the questions at this time. It's not that easy to change the PW vetting or any other system we have there as decisions are made collectively with the editorship, so almost everything takes a while to discuss and implement.

It was surprising the first time I realized trolls were very blatant about their intentions. Except for a certain thermonuclear one, but he's an exception. I don't know why they don't put in effort, they probably get dopamine from just submitting troll answers and that's all they need.

check my answer itt

In regards to Lemmygrad we keep it very simple. I think the questions are the same ones you had to answer back when you made your account, with the addition of a copy-paste job meant to prevent AI (and it works great). There's essentially 4 questions and you can keep it to one-two lines per answer because we have other systems on top of this one. On a forum like this trolls usually come out pretty quickly and get found out eventually because they keep posting. If they never post then they're not really a troll and cause no bother.

In my experience trolls and other bad actors actually don't bother trying to infiltrate the questions, they answer earnestly. Most of the rejections on lemmygrad are bots and people who wouldn't fit in here, so we direct them to an instance that would be better for them.

I can also shed light on the ProleWiki vetting since I'm involved in fashioning it. We start from the premise that if you are going to be writing long articles on an encyclopedia, then you would be more likely to answer a longer vetting form. Experience tells us that our premise is not entirely wrong for two reasons:

1. We ask for feedback on the process at the end of the form and people tell us that they actually enjoy the questions, it forces them to think about things they might not have known about before. There's a possibility that this is biased, i.e. the people that enjoy the process are the ones that go to the end of it in the first place, but -
2. We used to exist without a vetting process, you just had to tell us a bit about yourself freeform, and we didn't get that many more account requests than we do currently. I think our average number of account requests has been pretty consistent since 2021.

This leads us to believe the barrier to entry is somewhere else and that the vetting form doesn't factor in all that much.

The questions are designed to tell us a lot about the prospective editor, there's a need to prevent bots which is a huge problem on Mediawiki, but we also need to make sure new editors are knowledgeable in all topics, i.e. that they are marxists. We want to be sure our editors won't publish wrong or controversial information based on vibes. Once you get an account you can edit any page, so it's totally possible that your area of expertise is in economics and you don't know a lot about philosophy for example, but it works on the honor system and you promise to yourself you won't edit philosophy pages. If we didn't ask questions about philosophy we would never know that.

I agree with having people talk about themselves, but I don't think one necessarily needs open-ended questions for that. What I find with that type of question is that people usually keep it short instead, which ends up providing very little information about them. When evaluating an account request on ProleWiki we normally only have their answers to go with and nothing else. If something is not made explicit in the answers, then we won't know about that thing, so we need to encourage answers to be exhaustive.

The goal of this exhaustive process is not to gatekeep people but to make sure they have the knowledge required to become autonomous editors basically.

You were also wondering about the Principles. We have edited the principles to reflect editor commentary, e.g. wording or when we see the same point of confusion arise across different account requests. It allows us to see how people interpret our principles and we can also talk to them about that. There's major disagreements that lead to a request being denied, and then there's minor disagreements that arise from a reading misunderstanding (we can correct that by talking to the editor afterwards), or that as long as you agree not to reflect that disagreement in your edits is fine to live along with. If the question was simply "repeat that you agree to our principles and will not break them" we would be losing that self-crit component and might also be losing out on some requests because they feel a major disagreement that is actually only minor after we're able to talk with them about it.

It's a lengthy process but by our estimations it takes around 45 minutes on average to go through. This is a lot of time for some people and very little for others, but we are mindful of how long the process takes (along with how people discover it and how we can improve all of that package). The website doesn't save it I think, which is something I'd like it to do, and I also think there's too much text before the questions proper, but you should be able to copy the questions to Word, answer them at your pace there, and paste back into the PW form when you're done. That way you don't have to answer them all in one sitting.

edit: I wanted to add this but forgot. I like the idea of giving people one page to edit to see how they write etc. This is doable through the newish anon edits feature we rolled out some time back. But we might run into the same problem that this only tells us one facet of the prospective editor. But it's something I can definitely see us explore eventually.

Cushy non jobs for his friends and family I would assume

Changing theme seems to work on my end, I'm on desktop. I would suggest trying a different device otherwise maybe @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml might be able to help.

Are you clicking the Save button at the very bottom of the section where you change your display name?

(compliment)