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Marxists.org
Why this archive site, a duplicate of Marxists.org (MIA)?[edit source]
It's not what I want.
On October 23, 2017, I made a proposal to the administrators of Marxists.org (sent to the French admin who forwarded it to the mailing list of all international admins).
The proposal was to help modernize the Marxists.org site, so that it has features worthy of a modern site, in particular that it be a real database of texts rather than a juxtaposition of html pages like the 1990s internet. I argued that it was not for the pleasure of modernizing, but that this change of architecture would allow:
- to make searches in the texts easier (from the moment we have a database, it becomes easy to search by author, by date, or even to do multi-criteria searches...);
- to navigate more easily within the site, while maintaining a harmonization between the different pages, both in terms of interface (return to the menu or categories in one click) and look-and-feel (on marxists.org we can see big differences from one section of the site to another, depending on the arbitrary way of this or that admin to format...);
- to be able to connect the version of a text in one language with its translations in other languages, and thus to be able to access the translations in one click (which allows to find a text unfortunately not yet translated into its language, or to compare two versions which is sometimes of interest for the interpretation...);
- to be able to easily add a text (without needing to master html) and modify it easily (for example if we spot a typo while reading, or if a section was missing);
- to easily add export features (pdf, doc, epub...) for any text (whereas currently it is necessary to manually create these files, and recreate them if the text has been modified);
- ...
On the admins mailing list, the reactions were cold and sarcastic.
Attempt to show an example
After about a year of discouragement, I wanted to try to provide an example, hoping that it would be convincing once it was concrete. I started working on this site at the end of 2018.
The idea was to simply start with a bilingual French / English site.
It was a very big job, especially to find techniques to massively import texts from Marxists.org in the shortest possible time. I wanted at least all the texts of Marx and Engels available in French and English to be present.
In July 2020, I wrote to David Walters, the main English-speaking admin, to present the site to him.
His response was two lines: he does not see the point.
This is why the current situation exists.
Obviously all this has a rather demoralizing effect. I have not deleted the site for all that, especially since a certain number of other feedbacks (notably from slightly younger Marxists...) were on the contrary very positive.
I continued to complete the site at my own pace, telling myself that it would at least be useful to a French-speaking audience.
To date, I have added many texts from sources other than marxists.org (other websites that can also be seen as duplicates, such as MEPA), sometimes by digitizing them myself.
For Marx, Engels and Lenin, the archives are probably more complete than on marxists.org. I am the first to deplore this, and I add that it happened to me several times to send texts to marxists.org for them to be added, with random reactions (sometimes an addition, sometimes total silence). And according to other feedback, I'm not the only one this happens to.
If anyone from Marxists.org or anyone who has enough influence to shake things up (because yes, at this point we have a big problem with inertia...) reads this text, please don't hesitate to contact me.
