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.
In addition to vk6flab points,
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.