The consensus I see both inside and outside PW is that the library is pretty cool but a bit too empty still.
To help grow it, I've been thinking about letting in library editors. You could create a library editing account, which would be much easier to get than a "full" editor account.
This account would only have access to the library however, so as to add, edit and format books. With those permissions you could even translate books (chatGPT works great for this, much better than you'd expect), make reading lists, and probably do other stuff I haven't thought of yet. You would have access to all pages preceded by "Library:" essentially.
This would allow people who do not qualify for a full account or that we refuse for whatever reason to still participate in some capacity. Getting a library account would be much, much easier; there would be barely any questions (maybe 3-5).
For reference, this is the questions to get a full account: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount. There's even gonna be more questions soon, and we refuse a lot of requests, mostly from baby marxists and non-MLs.
It could also get you a foot in the door to later become a full editor more easily, doing the full vetting whenever you like after getting your library account and getting to know our processes, how we work, and just interacting with the community.
Now come the questions for this survey:
- Would you be interested in becoming a library editor over a full editor? Or would you just prefer to go through the "full" vetting process? Detail as much as you want here.
- If yes, how many hours a week do you think you could involve on the library? It's not a quota, it's just to get an idea of if this is worth pursuing.
- Is it clear to you what a library account is, and how it differs from the full account?
For now, we're just gauging interest in this. There's no process yet to add library editors, but if we go ahead with this we'll contact the interested comrades and invite them to make a library account.
(This is open to both Lemmygrad and Hexbear btw)
Thanks for reading and answering, as always your feedback is very much appreciated.
if you're gonna use machine translation, I would suggest using something that is meant for translation rather than ChatGPT, which may just be hallucinating (e.g., this HN thread)
I've heard deepl is pretty good at translating larger documents, but whoever is translating still should make sure to do a bunch of passes through the material to make sure it's correct.
I think there should be a much deeper consideration on translations because there are many subjective questions on it (i.e. if idiomatic expressions should be translated literally with footnotes or changed to a similar one in the target language) that have no one clear answer. But that's outside the scope of this thread.
I have heard good things about deepl as well. To your other point, Wikisource has a color-coded status for all pages (red - not proofread, yellow - proofread by 1 person, green - validated by another person). So some kind of status indicator like that could be good to show whether a translation has been checked or not.