Leftypedia

Leftypedia
Type	Online encyclopedia, wiki
Founded	2019
Founder	CyberSynGang (original version)
Key people	Harrystein, RedParabola (2024)
Users	98 registered users 1 active (Harrystein)
Espoused ideology	Marxism (before 2024) Revisionism (2024 onward)
URL	leftypedia.org (2019–2022) wiki.leftypol.org (2022–)

Leftypedia is a failed "left-unity" and "non-sectarian" encyclopedia founded in 2019. Initially, the site existed at the leftypedia.org domain name until it was removed after its founder stopped participating in the project in July 2022, but was revived under the wiki.leftypol.org domain later that year, hosted and maintained by leftypol.org. In 2024, a revisionist section of the site administration purged all Marxist–Leninist editors and installed a tiny rump editorship of mostly left-communists and anarchists. The project has never recovered since.

Although Leftypedia had many flaws during even its height, its external platforms allowed many anti-revisionist Marxist–Leninist editors to organize and eventually form the basis for Revolupedia later in 2024.

History

Founding and early development

See also: Marxistpedia

Leftypedia was founded in 2019 by users of Marxistpedia, a Trotskyist website, after it ceased to exist earlier that year. The initial goals of Leftypedia related to preserving content from Marxistpedia, resulting in Leftypedia inheriting much of the biased content from its predecessor. By early 2022, the initial version of Leftypedia would stagnate and become become plagued with constant spam attacks. In July 2022, the project's sole administrator, CyperSynGang, became inactive and discontinued Leftypedia, making it permanently inaccessible for the public.

Revival on Leftypol.org

Main article: Leftypol.org

By August 2022, Leftypedia was revived under wiki.leftypol.org, with its servers being maintained by administrators of the leftist message board leftypol.org. After importing a portion of the previous Leftypedia's content to the new site, administrator Nonmakina and the revived project generally became inactive, with only sporadic and meager contributions from other users.

2023 edit warring

Activity on Leftypedia would suddenly increase notably in late January 2023 when editors of a Dengist website, ProleWiki, attempted to create a promotional article about their project. In response, anti-revisionist user Wisconcom would create an account and remove promotional content. Following this, ProleWiki editors would begin a protracted edit war with Wisconcom on Leftypedia as part of their greater harassment effort against him and other anti-revisionists. The Leftypedia administrators sided with ProleWiki editors and permitted them to maintain their vanity pages which contained attacks on other users, even after they had engaged in uncivil conduct and even made legal threats on the site.

Later in 2023, user Harrystein was made an administrator after the others in that position were becoming inactive. Immediately afterwards, he banned multiple Marxist–Leninist users, claiming that they were alternative accounts of Wisconcom.

Growth and outreach in early 2024

Leftypedia would largely regress into its initial stagnation after August 2023, with Harrystein being the main contributor. Harrystein, at this time, would begin to allow anti-communist, incel, and other right-wing users onto the site, resulting in poor-quality edits, pages, and content explicitly promoting reactionary ideology.

On January 19, 2024, the account RedParabola was created. RedParabola would make many large contributions to Leftypedia, including designing a new main page, logo, refining the cite-wide stylizing, etc. RedParabola would also create an official Leftypedia Discord server, subreddit, and Lemmy community to gather support for the project. However, by May, RedParabola would begin to see the limitations of "left-wing unity," with him being unable to read more advance Marxist texts to members of the Discord study group he founded, having to permit anti-communists along with Trotskyists and Maoists to be present on the server, and so forth.

See also

• Anarchopedia