Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anarchism

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26 edits Luigi Galleani
18 edits Communization
13 edits V for Vendetta (film)
11 edits Litton Industries bombing
10 edits Kronstadt rebellion
9 edits Alfredo Cospito
8 edits Autonomedia
8 edits Albert Camus
7 edits Illegalism
7 edits Sin Chaeho

These are the articles that have been edited the most within the last seven days. Last updated 21 March 2023 by HotArticlesBot.

Recent literature (H1 2023)[edit]

Our 2022 thread of new book and journal article releases is about to age out, so thought I'd start a new thread for the first half of 2023. Feel free to add! czar 06:47, 15 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  • Allison, Charles (June 2023). No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno. PM Press. – Press
  • Araiza Kokinis, Troy Andreas (June 2023). Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay, 1956–76. AK Press. ISBN 978-1-84935-500-1. – Press
  • Baker, Zoe (May 2023). Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States. AK Press. ISBN 978-1-84935-498-1. OCLC 1345217229. – Press
  • Branson, Scott (October 2022). Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life. Pluto Press. OCLC 1304816739. – Press
  • D., Joni (January 2023). Agitated: Grupos Autónomos and Armed Anticapitalism in Spain, 1974–1984. Translated by Sharkey, Paul. AK Press. ISBN 978-1-84935-431-8. – Press
  • Firth, Rhiannon (July 2022). Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action. Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0-7453-4046-3. OCLC 1288196115. – Press
  • Laursen, Eric (August 2023). Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr Alex Comfort, Author of the Joy of Sex. AK Press. ISBN 978-1-84935-496-7. OCLC 1345217286. – Press
  • Löwy, Michael; Besancenot, Olivier (February 2023). Revolutionary Affinities: Toward a Marxist Anarchist Solidarity. Translated by Campbell, David. Oakland: PM Press. ISBN 978-1-62963-969-7. – Press
  • Torres, Anna Elena; Zimmer, Kenyon, eds. (May 2023). With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-04501-1. – Press
  • van der Linden, Marcel, ed. (November 2022). The Cambridge History of Socialism. The Cambridge History of Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-48135-9. – forthcoming in November; will be available through WP:TWL
  • Yeoman, James Michael (September 2022). Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915. Chico: AK Press. ISBN 978-1-84935-458-5. – Previously published by Routledge, 2020

Journals

czar 06:47, 15 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

More fun with original research[edit]

Following on from our fun discussion about citogenesis about the term "Free Territory", I have become even more vigilant about the possibility of original research making its way into our articles. Recently, a discussion over on the talk page for Libertarian Marxism found little in the way of reliable sources on the subject. Information was either entirely unsourced, interpreting sources in such a way that failed verification (many never even using the term "libertarian", let alone "libertarian Marxism") or using unreliable sources (notably a Libcom.org blog post). In the end, we found little in the way of a true tendency that could be described as "Libertarian Marxism", with even reliable sources on the subject describing it more as an umbrella term than an actually definable tendency.

I bring this up here because, in going through this myself, I discovered a copious amount of original research in our article about libertarian socialism, itself a vital article. I've mentioned before that I really dislike writing about ideology on Wikipedia and this is one of the reasons why, as these kind of articles can be a magnet for original interpretation of sources. Would anybody here be able to help with cleaning up this article and verifying its cited sources? I'm starting to think this is a larger problem than one person can fix. -- Grnrchst (talk) 10:48, 19 November 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

(To clarify, "cleaning up this article" is in reference to libertarian socialism, not Libertarian Marxism, yes?)
This one's quite messy. :) I don't recall on which talk page I said it, but I've long held that libertarian socialism should either become a disambiguation page for the different ideas it represents or, more simply, redirect to anarchism. It is most often covered in sources as a synonym for anarchism or as a descriptive term (i.e., a more libertarian form of socialism) and not as an independent school of thought with its own distinct history and proponents. It would make most sense to cover it in context of the articles.
Which brings us to the general predicament of these "ideology" articles. They were compiled with cut-and-paste copies from the ledes of related articles and ever since they deceivingly looked substantive enough to leave well alone, but on closer examination, the articles communicate nothing—they're glorified lists summarizing related but ultimately disparate concepts. They need to be rewritten to focus on secondary-source analysis about the article's discrete concept and its impact.
Many of the ideology articles are suffering from this currently, but libertarian socialism is among the worst off. It's definitely more than one person can fix. In my opinion, it needs either redirection (based on my reading of the sources in the definition article) or if it must be kept distinct, WP:TNT. czar 06:16, 5 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
It looks to me like the best move would be some form of merge, discarding the repeated stuff, across Anarchism and History of Anarchism. There are some things that the Libertarian socialism article explains more usefully than the main Anarchism article. Or at least, that's my sense from skimming them. I haven't gone any further with this idea than checking citations on Libertarian socialism to see if they're actually relevant - any further than that and I start to think "if you're in the mood to do writing/editing that is hard, shouldn't you be doing the writing that is your actual job?" and bail. So I hesitate to outright propose a merge knowing I'm unlikely to contribute much to it. Happy to pop in and check some sources though. -- asilvering (talk) 20:11, 6 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

"If you're in the mood to do writing/editing that is hard, shouldn't you be doing the writing that is your actual job?"

I'm going to pin this to the wall in my office. It's also what makes me hesitant to really take on tackling this problem - I've got far more interesting and important tasks to do. :P Grnrchst (talk) 10:36, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Reminds me of a certain ideology's "who will do the dirty work?" dilemma... :) My corrolary would be, if you're capable but not doing the writing/editing that is hard, who will? In my case it helps that I like this otherwise "dirty" work because it solves real problems. I try to do the "hard" stuff exclusively! czar 14:36, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Aye that's why I'm taking to this now. Even if it's dirty work, it needs doing. Grnrchst (talk) 14:43, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Czar: Yes I was talking about the libertarian socialism article, as the libertarian Marxism article no longer exists. I don't know if I agree that turning it into a disambiguation page is the right move. While libertarian socialism has indeed been used as a synonym for anarchism, it has also evolved to encompass more than just anarchism (See Kinna, et al. 2012). I think while dynamiting the entire article might be a bit hasty, I definitely think that taking a sledgehammer to its more egregious sections would be worth it.
Outside of the libertarian socialism article, I just stumbled upon the article about collectivist anarchism and noticed it was almost entirely unrelated to the subject. I went bold and cut everything but the lead (which upon inspection may also require some TLC) in order to build it up from scratch. I also noticed some original interpretation going on in the articles about anarchism without adjectives and synthesis anarchism - implying that the two tendencies were linked in a way that the cited source never did.
Now I'm left wondering how many of our articles about ideology have these problems, how many of them can be salvaged, how many are even worth salvaging. What you mentioned about ideology articles acting as compilations of leads for other articles is certainly a big problem. In a quick pass, I've noticed this issue with the articles about social anarchism, left-libertarianism, individualist anarchism, anarcho-communism, green anarchism, free-market anarchism. How many of these articles actually stand by themselves? How much of our project consists of articles summarising other articles that summarise other articles? It's the encyclopedic equivalent of an ouroboros. Grnrchst (talk) 10:34, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
My position is that nearly all of these "anarchist tendency"/"anarchist school of thought" ideology articles have the problems you mention and that almost all of them would be reduced to rubble in order to be rehabilitated. I already did this to some of the ideology articles some years ago for the easier ones. It's been this way for years and the solution is quite clear, which is why I don't think it's a "hasty" conclusion. The "compilation of leads" issue traces back to a single editor some years ago who made some bold edits and it would require some similarly bold edits to undo. We shouldn't be hesitant to do that (1) on principle, and (2) if it improves the articles. And in my take, these articles are virtually unreadable as is, so a reduction to what is verifiable analysis from reliable, secondary sources would be a sorely needed improvement. The best time to plant a tree is 100 years ago and the second best time is today. In my experience, after reducing those articles to sources about the concept itself, many won't have enough sources to support a dedicated article, which means that we should merge those sources and cover the concept in its parent article or a broader overview article or, as I suggested in this specific topic under discussion, a disambiguation page. czar 14:15, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Aye I agree with you completely here. I'm going to do my best to be bold and cut out the fluff where I see it. We'll see where we can take it from there, once we have stuff down to reliable sources.
The only article that I think makes any sort of sense to exist as one of these compilation-type things is the Anarchist schools of thought article, and even there that has issues if it's just going to amount to copy-pasted content. (I just found the entire article for anarcho-naturism was copy-pasted into the article for green anarchism)
To be clear, I don't think your conclusion was hasty, I more meant we need to be methodical about this. I've been accused of vandalism for removing poorly-sourced content before, so I want to make sure I'm doing this by the book.
At the end of the day, whatever we can do to make these articles more encyclopedic and less like political pamphlets, the better. -- Grnrchst (talk) 14:25, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I haven't had time to do this yet but I'd like to revise Anarchism for FA and when doing so, I think it'll obviate the need for the dedicated "schools of thought" subarticle, which is (like the others), another compilation of lede paragraphs.
"Vandalism" gets thrown around on Wikipedia often but anyone who thinks that removing unsourced content is vandalism would be showing their unfamiliarity with the community's five pillars, one of which is verifiability: "The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material." If anyone gives you a hard time, let us know on this talk page (as a third party opinion, if need be) so we can back you up. czar 14:44, 8 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Didn't take long for me to need to ask for a third opinion, and it's for a dispute over the term "free territory" again. *sigh* It's genuinely distressing to me how long this has been drawn out. All this time I've been going through sources to build out articles about the Makhnovists, and to be left arguing about a piece of terminology not used by any of them... Idk... -- Grnrchst (talk) 07:59, 11 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Czar: Actually, I'm wondering if this might be a larger behavioural problem with the user pushing the issue. I noticed they added original research to the article on mutual aid and I removed it, causing another dispute. See the talk page there. For now, I'm going to disengage, as it doesn't seem like it's possible for me to have a productive conversation with them. -- Grnrchst (talk) 09:45, 12 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Grnrchst fwiw, you're not the only one to notice, eg: [1]. -- asilvering (talk) 23:47, 13 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Asilvering: Aye I noticed others had brought this up. I'm still going to disengage though, because at this point I feel like I'm being gaslit. It's too much. --Grnrchst (talk) 07:45, 14 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Welp. I am about a month into culling the OR from these articles and I am shocked at how much of a nothingburger many of them are turning out to be. So far I have removed roughly 80% of the articles on libertarian socialism, social anarchism and green anarchism due to a number of egregious issues. Whether it be sections that only exist to summarise other articles, text cited to sources that verifiably do not even imply what they're cited to, or text that is just flat-out irrelevant to the article.
It is frankly overwhelming that these articles managed to get this bad. With libertarian socialism and green anarchism, I've arrived at the point where I've pretty much cut everything that could be cut and have compiled sources that can be used to rebuild it (albeit much smaller than the previous versions). But with social anarchism, I'm wondering what the point of the article even is, as it seems like the term only exists in contrast to individualist anarchism (another article that needs cutting down). --Grnrchst (talk) 14:28, 30 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
re: them getting bad, I think of it like a broken windows metaphor: If an article is a stub, readers will try to expand/grow it, but if it's long, even if it's unreadable (i.e., the broken windows), readers will tend to gloss and nitpick rather than attempt to overhaul. It's easier to add than to prune, and pruning gives the article room and likelihood to expand again.
re: these three, thanks for your work editing these down. I'd be surprised if the first two aren't merged elsewhere (as terms rather than traditions with distinct histories). Green anarchism has a bit more standing as a distinct tradition (with dedicated sources) rather than just a term but would need to be disentangled from how we cover primitivism, contemporary groups like the ELF, eco-terrorism, etc. czar 16:53, 30 December 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I have now rebuilt the article on social anarchism and plan to move on to libertarian socialism and anarcho-communism soon. I'm trying to stick very strictly to sources that verifiably use the terminology of the subject, in order to keep it from spiralling into nonsensical OR. -- Grnrchst (talk) 18:44, 18 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Do you see it having enough sourcing to justify a standalone article? It seems to me like it has significant scope overlap with anarchism and definition of anarchism and could be covered within there, based on the current content. czar 05:20, 19 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Yeah I think so. All of the cited sources discuss "social anarchism" specifically and many at length. Think the main thing that separates this from "anarchism" is that this is the name for the non-individualist anarchist schools of thought. I personally found it profoundly uninteresting to research but I think the existence of a short, well-sourced article is better than its non-existence... and especially better than a long, meandering list with bad sourcing. -- Grnrchst (talk) 08:49, 19 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Damn that must have sucked.. Thank you for your contribution and sacrifice! SP00KYtalk 17:20, 19 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
No worries. Hopefully this is leading towards an improved encyclopedic experience for our readers. -- Grnrchst (talk) 17:41, 26 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
My research led me into a detour and I started reading into anarcha-feminism, which I found fascinating. So that article has now been almost completely rewritten and restructured, in order to hopefully make it a more broad overview of the subject rather than a series of foci about variously related individuals. Let me know if/where you think I've gone too far or haven't gone far enough. :) -- Grnrchst (talk) 17:40, 26 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Now I really should be working on restructuring the article on anarcho-syndicalism for the WP:Labor Edit-a-Thon, but this morning I decided to take a peek at free-market anarchism and was shocked at how bad it was. I've just removed the entire history section because literally none of the sources referenced a "market anarchism" or any of its synonyms. There's honestly so little going on there that I'm once again wondering if this article even needs to exist. Maybe it does, I did find a couple reliable sources, but even those refer to it either as a very broad umbrella term or as synonymous with half a dozen other anarchist and left-libertarian schools of thought. -- Grnrchst (talk) 15:35, 1 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I will admit to having wondered if that article was mostly just an accidental kludge of Individualist anarchism and Anarcho-capitalism... -- asilvering (talk) 22:33, 1 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Welp, I've cut down all of the synth that was propping up the "free-market anarchism" article and what is left is... not good. As @Asilvering mentioned above, the article was mostly just a bunch of various different topics incoherently mashed together. Without that, not much of quality is left.
I did manage to rebuild the insurrectionary anarchism article, from a confusing mess of quotes cited from insurrecto magazines to an actual article based on academic sources, so that's something. But I have very little interest in doing the same for the "free-market anarchism" article. Maybe someone will have the desire to go through the sources I left in the bibliography, but I really can't be bothered with such a strange ideological mish-mash. -- Grnrchst (talk) 19:24, 2 March 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Systemic bias report[edit]

Hi everyone. For some time I've been interested in helping counter systemic bias within the WikiProject and Wikipedia more generally. Recently I decided it would be a good idea to do a quantitative report about systemic bias in the project, in order for us to best figure out how to move forward with improving our project's coverage. Today I finished my report, which you can read at Wikipedia:WikiProject Anarchism/Systemic bias report February 2023. I would be delighted to hear your thoughts. Regards. -- Grnrchst (talk) 19:35, 16 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

This was great, thank you for doing this! IDK if it is helpful but we are currently working towards a MENA+ anarchist library which may be at least slightly useful in future endeavours rectifying coverage of certain regions. Another comment I make would be in the region of Iraq and Syria for example a lot of the Anarchism related content often only revolves around Apoist politics and the Rojava experiment. SP00KYtalk 01:38, 22 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Nihilist Communism[edit]

Anyone have additional reliable sources to justify the independent notability of "Nihilist Communism"? Right now it's covered as a neologism from primary sources. czar 05:08, 18 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Czar It appears this started off as a stub about the mentioned book but then someone changed the scope to imply this was an actual tendency. The only scholarly reviews I've found that even mention the book are actually reviews of a different book written by one of the authors. The only secondary source listed in the article barely even references it in passing, in a footnote. This stub reads more-or-less like an advert for the book, not even really going into depth about what the book is about, so I'd support an AfD for this. -- Grnrchst (talk) 10:37, 18 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
My understanding is it's a 'micro-ideology' based off of essentially one piece uploaded to T@L which attempted to synthesize Stirner with Anarcho-Communism into an ideology. This article would have my support to delete, i would have done it myself if I knew how.
My personal opinion on this wider issue is that this is not the kind of thing in general we should entertain, i think these kind of 'meme politics' on wikipedia are actively harmful to the project and as well as lacking actual quality definitions of even prominent tendencies within anarchist milieus this kind of stuff leaves people coming away with a more incorrect understanding of the Anarchist space than before. I guess what i'm saying is that for this kind of extremely niche stuff, Be Bold; Bin it. :) SP00KYtalk 01:48, 22 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Nominated here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Nihilist Communism czar 23:21, 25 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I think we'll have an easier time weeding out the "meme politics" if we took a more hard line on sources. There are many ideology articles that consist largely of information cited to obscure anarchist pamphlets, magazines and even blog posts. It's difficult to gauge how relevant a "micro-ideology" is if there aren't any reliable secondary sources being cited anywhere in the article. -- Grnrchst (talk) 17:24, 28 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Is AFAQ an RS?[edit]

In my recent run through the ideology articles covered by the project, I noticed a lot of them used Iain McKay's Anarchist FAQ. I made the decision to cut it in a number of cases, as I recalled that previous discussions about it suggested it might be questionable as a source, and there weren't many cases where it was cited to information that couldn't be drawn from a more clearly reliable source. But I'm bringing this up now because I saw that @Centralia1 has recently used it as a source for certain authoritative-sounding statements.[2][3]

I will note that a discussion was had on this over a decade ago (between people that no longer use Wikipedia). This discussion didn't really evolve into consensus, ending in disagreement between its two main participants: one insisting it unreliable, citing its promotional nature; while the other disputed this. @Czar has also questioned its reliability in a discussion from early 2019, but didn't go into much further detail than that it shouldn't be used for statements of fact.

Given these discussions were quite old and I wasn't able to participate in either, I thought I'd bring this up here. Does the Anarchist FAQ constitute a reliable source or is it questionable? Is there any content unique to the FAQ that might be missing from more clearly reliable sources? Are there cases that it could be reasonably used (e.g. for easily verifiable statements of fact, or with attribution for opinions)? Grnrchst (talk) 09:18, 21 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hello Grnrchst I think the AFAQ is a reliable source for social anarchist viewpoints that might be missing from more reliable academic sources. As for the AFAQ itself it does have some academic support which I believe increases its credibility more. The AFAQ has been regarded as “…very comprehensive…” by Graham, Paul; Hoffman, John. Introduction to Political Ideologies London: Pearson/Longman. (2006) pp 109 And as an "exemplar of the principles…” of community governing by Harvard resident fellow Joseph Reagle in: Why the Internet is Good - Community governance that works well Berkman Center for Internet and Society: Harvard Law School (1998) Retrieved June 20, 2009 from: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/reagle/regulation-19990326.html I think the AFAQ could generally be reasonably used in cases where social anarchist viewpoints are appropriate. I believe that it is unique in focusing on the history of anarchism and socialism from a social anarchist viewpoint. Centralia1 (talk) 01:19, 22 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Viewpoint might not be the best word I used. Instead maybe I should say I think the AFAQ is a fairly credible resource that can be used when editing on Wikipedia in regards to social anarchism generally in my opinion. Centralia1 (talk) 03:39, 22 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Entry of a batch of sources[edit]

Hello everyone, recently Chinese anarchists have compiled a number of articles published by Liu Shifu in various publications (i.e. Huiminglu), and they have also uploaded them on the Chinese Marxist Internet Archive (see here), most of which have been published for over 100 years and Liu himself has been dead for over 100 years, so they should have been released into the public domain. I think it's a pity that no one has translated them into English, so I'm doing this, and I welcome you to join and comment. Cheers! ときさき くるみ not because they are easy, but because they are hard 22:39, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Tokisaki Kurumi: That's awesome! Thanks so much for doing this, it's a wonderful project. Unfortunately my Chinese comprehension only extends to "hello" and "goodbye", so I don't know how much help I'd be in translation, but I'm more than happy to help copy-edit. -- Grnrchst (talk) 22:56, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Grnrchst: So contrary to you, my English is not very good (lol). Anyway, thanks a lot for your works! ときさき くるみ not because they are easy, but because they are hard 22:58, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
They actually also uploaded works from Ba Jin (here), I like this one (Sacco and Vanzetti are innocent) very much. But Ba's works are not in PD yet, so I will not translate them. ときさき くるみ not because they are easy, but because they are hard 23:42, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
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