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.
Decentralize the shit out of this, please. Make sure their tech-heads know that the document itself is unkillable. It’ll always pop up somewhere else.
This is a fantastic idea, at least in some form.
The category of information could stand as much defining as possible. I like where it’s going, laying out lies and dog whistles and incorrectly defined terms.
The first column in a table is labeled “reality”, in black lettering, and it says, for example, “I will underpay you and you will sing my praises for it”, and the second column is labeled “fascist lie”, with words written in red, and in red letters it says “personal responsibility”. Lead with the truth. Eye is drawn to the truth, so maybe red is bad if it draws the eye, even though it’s also the color for “incorrect”. These are the choices that matter.
You could refine those substitutions to make a little fascist translator. Maybe re-write key lines of relevant speeches in translated form.
Just riffing. Whatever it becomes, make sure you state the facts in a way where you actually communicate them, as opposed to some idiot headline like “jd vance says (random lie)”, helping the lie instead of helping the truth.
Very much like this idea, in a lot of variations.
My inclination is, focus up. You’ll have sticking power through focus more than being an all in one shop. Maybe. If you feel a strong pull otherwise, then maybe not.
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.
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
I can totally see this being a problem, and the way I see of fixing this is by creating different categories of articles. One category could act encyclopedia/news-like, attempting to simply restate facts from an unbiased perspective(You might have one article that explains everything the current admin has done in relation to our nuclear arsenal, for example), whilst another category could act more like Wikipedia:Essays and essays/guides enjoyed/used by the community might be promoted to a third category of high quality guides and essays.
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.
I see this as a problem, much more then the first problem of yours I covered. I personally do not outsource my moral systems to laws or believe that because something is illegal it is always bad, but I also do not know if I would like to cover direct action. I think that if(when) fascism gets worse, direct action will begin to become necessary(if it is not already) so I am leaning on allowing the coverage of direct action, just not the more illegal-to-cover forms of it until fascism gets worse/the wiki is more secure.
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.)
> How do you get enough “reporters” to write the pages? Advertising on Lemmy and across the internet would be great, and additionally I might be able to contact the owners of the r/50501 subreddit to put something up.
> What does your vision of a topic look like? I dont feel I understand this question well, but my understanding of it is that it is asking for my vision of what coverage of certain topics will look like (If I’m wrong, feel free to elaborate) I think this from another comment is a pretty good explanation:
“One category could act encyclopedia/news-like, attempting to simply restate facts from an unbiased perspective(You might have one article that explains everything the current admin has done in relation to our nuclear arsenal, for example), whilst another category could act more like Wikipedia:Essays and essays/guides enjoyed/used by the community might be promoted to a third category of high quality guides and essays.”
> How do you see this having an impact on these incidents?
In the past few weeks, a lot of whats happened has been expected. I expected the administration to go after free press, I expected the administration to go after trans people, I expected the administration to lay off thousands of workers and replace them with loyalists. These were all things I expected. It was the ways they happened, the speed by which they happened, and the unexpected(e.g; musk nazi salute) that really damaged my mental health and kept me paralyzed. I was overwhelmed from all the news coming from so many different angles, I couldn’t actually think about what to do about it, I couldn’t resist, and I could not even do preemptive work to protect myself from the future.
It is my belief that if past actions are calmly laid out together combined with planned future actions and analysis of rhetoric, resistors and potential victims(i.e everyone) of fascism can not only mentally prepare for the next steps of fascism, but can come up with new ideas for action against fascism, and can execute these ideas with themselves and their communities. This potentially combined with guides for what can be done to resist or be safe against fascism would absolutely be helpful imo.
> 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.)
Oh. absolutely. The more I look at this, the bigger of a project it seems. If the wiki were to large (or be a target as a result of being large) then by then I would have already amounted enough contributors to help with writing articles as well as administrating the wiki for the load on me to not be too unbearable. I see issues with starting the wiki, or keeping the wiki going if it turns out there are very little contributors. I’m thinking of lowering the scope, growing a decent stable community, then expanding the scope later when things show themselves to be mostly stable.
This post is mostly intended on gauging interest to see how many might contribute if I were to heavily advertise it as well as to see what people would find useful in such a wiki. If it turns out very little are interested, or very little say they would find it useful, then I will drop the idea.
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.
