For the past few days, an idea has been swishing around in my brain: Could we create a wiki to track fascism in the US, aswell as give advice on how to resist (or stay safe from) it? I feel much more could be accomplished with a community driven wiki then an app or website that summarizes executive orders/goals of project 2025. Im most interested in tracking how different actions connect to create something much more dangerous then the actions on their own (for example: pornography being criminalized combined with labeling trans people as pornography) creating guides for effective and safe protest, HRT access, fleeing the US, etc, and archiving leaked US memos.
I have mediawiki experience, and could definitely set up something for this, thing is, a wiki like what is suggested above would only be helpful if it had active contributers. So before advertising it anywhere else, I would like to see how much interest there is for a wiki, as well as potential problems and suggestions.
This sounds interesting. I think the possible technical/legal/organizational problems could be overcome pretty easily. I personally know nothing about “resisting” or anything like that, so wouldn’t be able to contribute. I feel a lot of information is already published in some form or another by many other disparate groups, and it may be useful to aggregate and link it all in one place. I think it may be hard to nail-down the scope of the project, and stuff like what are acceptable forms of resistance to write about. Some people may suggest joining grifter organizations, or federal honeypots, or whatever other crazy organizations there are out there. I think a lot of “resistance” is ephemeral ATM, like the protests being organized by random groups, and is only useful information for a limited time (though I guess it could be useful to keep it, and maybe try to record estimated turnout and stuff like that).
I guess the biggest problem I see is that some content may be commentary or opinionated, and you’d probably want to enforce what opinions are acceptable. Or, you could try to do the Wikipedia, neutral POV thing, somehow. For instance, AFAIK, the implied plan about banning trans information is just conjecture at this point, and I’m not sure it would hold up to standards like Wikipedia has (I do believe this is a plan Republicans have in mind though). However, if rules are too lax, people could end-up posting outlandish conspiracy theories. So, not sure the best way to thread that needle.
In addition to vk6flab points,
- How do you get enough “reporters” to write the pages?
- What does your vison of a topic look like?
- How do you see this having an impact on these incidents?
It would not be hard to set up, but I think spreading the word, then maintaining it (if it becomes a target) could be a huge amount of overhead. I like the concept, I’m just wondering if there is a lower threshold way to make this happen. (Different platform, lowering the scope, etc.)
Interesting idea. How would you:
- Validate content?
- Prevent defacement?
- Protect against lawsuits?
I’m asking because it’s likely that you’d soon run into these issues.
1 & 2. Mediawiki(the same technology Wikipedia is ran on) has many tools that can be used to validate edits and prevent spam. You can lock important pages to only receive edits from admins, bots, autoconfirmed users, etc. You can require an email for creating an account, you can mass-delete pages created by spammers, you can create filters. There are many many extensions available to help in this too. For making sure content is high quality, we would probably set up some guidelines for content written on the site, and edit non-complying content to comply with standards. As the wiki would grow larger, these mechanisms could organically grow with it.
- I don’t really believe lawsuits would be an issue (for now, at least) For the same reasons you cant sue Wikipedia for defamation, you wouldn’t be able to sue our wiki. Our wiki would have the legal defense of being a platform rather than a publisher(I assume that does not mean frivolous lawsuits could be damaging, though) I see lawsuits only becoming an issue if the wiki grows large, or as fascism gets worse.
I (and others who contribute the most/manage the wiki) generally would want to remain anonymous.
One very nice thing is that itt is fairly easy to just have a simple script that creates a daily dump of the entire wiki every day allowing for it to be easily put back up(Mediawiki software is easy to get running) incase the original host goes offline.
I only see these things (specifically the lawsuits) being an issue if the wiki were popular though.
