Editing Guide

Create a New Page

To create a new page, just put a title into the address bar. To make a page on Anarres, type: anarchyinaction.org/index.php?title=Anarres

...then when the page isn't found, you just click the "edit this page" link, save, and voila it's a new page.

After creating a new page, please add a link on the Main Page.

Content

For Societies, and when possible for communities, try to use the following headings:

Culture, Decisions, Economy, Environment, Crime, Revolution (if applicable), Neighboring Societies. These are based on the chapters of Anarchy Works.

While we hope to eventually have primarily original articles, it is fine to make an article based on a passage from a book, article or website as long as you cite the source.

Create a New Heading

Write =...= to make a heading, ==...== to make a sub-heading, and so on.

Linking

To link inside the wiki, type [[...]].

To link outside the wiki, type [...] or click the chain links in the toolbar.

Italics, Bold, and Both

italics, bold, and both

Upload images and documents

Use the left sidebar to upload images and documents. To embed the document or image on the wiki, click on the framed landscape in the toolbar.

Citations

The following websites are great resources for how to cite sources.

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html

http://www.supersummary.com/citation-guide/

Rationale

When editing this wiki, it is important to keep track of the origin of the text that you add. Contributing from other sources, such as books, articles, and websites, is encouraged. However, you must be careful to cite the original source. Good citations allow users of this wiki to sort out information and opinions added to the wiki and decide how reliable that information is.

When gathering from books, articles, and websites, just jot down basic information about the source. Then add that to the wiki when you save your edit. It doesn't have to be very detailed, but more detail is always helpful. The important thing is that other users will be able to figure out where the text came from so that they can get to it if they want to.

To make a footnote, type <ref>...</ref> around each footnote.

Then, type <references/> at the end of the page.

Books

At least keep track of the author, title, the year it was published and the page number. Here is the suggested format:

Ursuka K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (New York: HarperCollins, 1974), 166-176.

Articles

If you copy text from printed or online articles or newspapers, include the name of the magazine or newspaper and the article date.

Suggested format:

Mazzeti, Mark, "C.I.A. Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels", New York Times, 14 October 2014.

This wiki

It you're citing another page on this wiki, just paste a link in the footnote. Suggested format:

Athenian polis, "Decisions"

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a helpful section about citing its articles. Wikipedia also provides a tool to generate citations for particular articles. For the cite tool, see Wikipedia:Citing_sources, or follow the "Cite this page" link in the toolbox on the left of the page in the article you wish to cite.

Websites

At least paste the URL. The date you accessed it is also helpful. Here is the suggested format:

“Who the Heck Are We?,” Anarchy On Air, last modified 2014, http://anarchyonairwesu.tumblr.com/about.

Listing on the Main Page

Please see the Definitions page for a description of the two ways in which we sort our examples on the Main Page. First, how is it organized: (a) anarchist, (b) anti-authoritarian, (c) participatory or (d) autonomous. If you're not sure, put it in (e) unsorted.

Second, what type of example is it: (a) society, (b) movement or rebellion, (c) community, (d) organization, (e) everyday anarchy, (f) nonhuman anarchy, or (g) fictional anarchy.

For anarchist and anti-authoritarian societies, communities and organizations, please write the peak and/or current membership numbers, when possible.

For societies, communities and organizations that are participatory but not anti-authoritarian, please write the peak and/or current number of members granted full rights, when possible.

The Tricky Topic of Representation

From the main page: "If you see misinformation, please contact us right away so that we can either fix it or assist you in setting up an account so you can edit the page directly. See the About page for more information. Additionally, if you are a member of an organization or another group described on this website, please feel free to send us information on current campaigns, and we will include it so that our readers will know how to get involved or participate in solidarity efforts."

This passage from Peter Gelderloos's Anarchy Works suggests some useful ways to avoid misrepresenting Global South and Indigenous anarchy. If you have additional suggestions, please contact us.

As anarchists trying to abolish the power structure responsible for colonialism and many other wrongs, we want to approach these other cultures in good faith, in order to learn from them, but if we’re not careful we could easily fall into the accustomed eurocentric pattern of manipulating and exploiting these other cultures for our own ideological capital. In cases where we could find no one from the community in question to review and criticize our own interpretations, we have tried to situate the storyteller in the telling, to subvert his or her objectivity and invisibility, to deliberately challenge the validity of our own information, and to propose representations that are flexible and humble. We don’t know exactly how to accomplish this balancing act, but our hope is to learn while trying.

Some indigenous people whom we consider comrades in the struggle against authority feel that white people have no right to represent indigenous cultures, and this position is especially justified given that for five hundred years, Euro/American representations of indigenous peoples have been self-serving, exploitative, and connected to ongoing processes of genocide and colonization. On the other hand, part of our goal in publishing this book has been to challenge the historical eurocentrism of the anarchist movement and encourage ourselves to be open to other cultures. We could not do this by only presenting stories of statelessness from our own culture. The author and most of the people working on this book in an editorial capacity are white, and it is no surprise that what we write reflects our backgrounds. In fact, the central question this book seeks to address, whether anarchy could work, seems itself to be eurocentric. Only a people who have obliterated the memory of their own stateless past could ask themselves whether they need the state. We recognize that not everyone shares this historical blindspot and that what we publish here may not be useful for people from other backgrounds. But we hope that by telling stories of the cultures and struggles of other societies, we can help correct the eurocentrism endemic to some of our communities and become better allies, and better listeners, whenever people from other cultures choose to tell us their own stories.

Someone who read over this text pointed out to us that reciprocity is a fundamental value of indigenous worldviews. The question he posed to us was, if anarchists who are mostly Euro/American are going to take lessons from indigenous or other communities, cultures, and nations, what will we offer in return? I hope that wherever possible, we offer solidarity — widening the struggle and supporting other peoples who struggle against authority without calling themselves anarchists. After all, if we are inspired by certain other societies, shouldn’t we do more to recognize and aid their ongoing struggles?

Stylistic Notes

We will usually try to use Indigenous people's names for places and put (settler) colonial names, like the "United States", in quotation marks.

When describing the socially-constructed Black race, we capitalize it in order to support the efforts of Black liberation groups that have reclaimed the term and turned it into a source of cultural pride and liberation. We also capitalize most other ethnic, religious, and national groups, like Asian, Jewish, Muslim, American, and so on.

We do not capitalize "white" when describing the socially-constructed white race, since efforts to reclaim that term are intrinsically linked with racial hierarchy. Unlike Black liberation groups that celebrate a genuine culture created by their people(s), white-identity groups do not have anywhere near a coherent culture that they can comparably celebrate. As Noel Ignatiev writes:

"Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet."

In the past, we have sometimes written (with a small-b) black and (with scare quotes) "white" around race traitors like John Brown in order to de-naturalize race and make the same points as above (Black culture and even American culture are legitimate, but white culture isn't). However, going forward, we will capitalize Black as is done by Black liberation groups and we will not put scare-quotes around white even when describing someone like John Brown or, for that matter, Ignatiev. Yes, they might have fought to abolish whiteness, as we do too, but they still benefited from white privilege and that should be recognized.

Research Resources

Please support anarchist publishers like AK Press and PM Press.

You can also find plenty of free stuff at these links:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org

https://libcom.org/book

https://libcom.org/library/libcomorg-reading-guide

The books links near the top of our About page

Further Reading

In addition to the instructions above, you will find helpful resources and information here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet

https://anarchyinaction.org/index.php?title=Help:Contents

These websites are useful information on citations:

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

https://getlibre.org/wiki/index.php?title=Citation