Update: they have ascertained that Parabola was Wisconcom lmao. In that light, if correct, it’s more of a wrecker doing what he does than the project failing. We still don’t have a lot of info though. They’ve written about it here: https://wiki.leftypol.org/wiki/Leftypedia:Community_hub
Earlier today, the new rendition of Leftypedia finally imploded. Going off the block list, it’s a real mess.
Leftypedia was brought back from its last incarnation in early 2023. If you remember (or not), it had issues with Wisconcom then who latched onto it. The problem is because they had no active admins and couldn’t find them, they couldn’t ban him indefinitely.
Eventually, they did find new admins who kicked the project back into gear, or at least they tried to.
Earlier today though, it seems there has been a split and one of the admins (Parabola) basically banned all the others as well as several other users. Where it gets weird is that another admin (Aussig) then banned Parabola, but didn’t undo the bans Parabola issued. Aussig also banned me and Forte’s account, which we used back when Wisconcom was on there, for “ideological deviations”, but Aussig calls themselves a Marxist-Leninist on their user page.
From what I understand there was a split between the different tendencies. So anyway that’s how the “left unity” wiki is going lol sorry but this is funny.
Aussig is irrelevant in general, but her contributions had lead to the Prolewiki accounts being banned. She just took advantage of the vandalism and used it for her own purpose. I can personally confirm that Aussig is not a sock puppet account, especially given she was participating in the discord server not in the same way as Parabola (Wisconcom). She was a part of the scandal but for different reasons.
I think Parabola made a larger dent into Leftypedia that will take harder to scrub off compared to Prolewiki. Especially given at the rate the articles are being changed (Literally productivity has been cut in half since Parabola is gone, only leaving Harrystein to edit the wiki), we won’t see Leftypedia recovered.
The reputational damage is a good point, its extent is kind of lost on me as I’m not very involved in the wiki circles but obviously this is gonna hurt it and isn’t easy to scrub off as the vandal banned ProleWiki users like you, Forte and OP, doing so as a supposed authority of Leftypedia.
I think they’ll recover from the reputation damage. I hope they learn from this that you can’t trust just anyone and you have to be careful about who you let in. They seem to have responded rapidly too and the vandalism and blocks have been undone. I hope now they can reorganize, because imo this is really what they were missing, especially for a project that wants to allow all/most leftist currents.
It was also unclear, in my opinion again, that Parabola was only an admin of the project since yesterday. From how active they were, you wouldn’t have thought so. This is why I think they need to first develop organizational methods, to be more effective down the line.