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39-531: Marxists Internet Archive , also known as MIA or Marxists.org , is a non-profit online encyclopedia that hosts a multilingual library (created in 1990) of the works of communist , anarchist , and socialist writers, such as Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels , Vladimir Lenin , Leon Trotsky , Joseph Stalin , Mao Zedong , Rosa Luxemburg , Mikhail Bakunin , Peter Kropotkin , and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon , as well as that of writers of related ideologies, and even unrelated ones (for instance, Sun Tzu ). The collection

78-653: A copyright claim was added to the materials included. The website no longer exists. Other digitization projects have made progress in other titles; one example is Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897) digitized by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library . A successful digitization of an encyclopedia was the Bartleby Project 's online adaptation of the Columbia Encyclopedia , Sixth Edition, in early 2000 and

117-440: A commercial ISP . This was followed by an increased activity from the volunteers. In the following years, however, a conflict developed between the volunteers working on the website and Zodiac, who retained control of the project and domain name. As the scope of the archive expanded, Zodiac feared that the opening toward diverse currents of Marxism was a "slippery slope" toward sectarianism . The volunteers who had been undertaking

156-595: A field of research that ultimately led to the range of journals that Lawrence & Wishart now publish. John Newsinger wrote that the Communist vendetta against George Orwell 's Homage to Catalonia was maintained as recently as 1984, when Lawrence & Wishart published Inside the Myth , a collection of essays "bringing together a variety of standpoints hostile to Orwell in an obvious attempt to do as much damage to his reputation as possible." Continuing to publish

195-584: A further increase in activity and an enlargement of the scope of the archive. As for Marx.org, Zodiac closed it down in 1999, and in 2002 he gave up the domain name, which was purchased by the MIA. Along with marxists.org, the MIA can be reached by two other domain names: lenin.org and trotsky.org. The site, and the group of volunteers working on it, has dramatically changed since its early beginnings. By 2014 it had grown to encompass 62 volunteers in 33 different countries, and held over 50,000 items in 54 languages covering

234-452: A real version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , a fictional encyclopedia used in the works of Douglas Adams . Although it originally aimed to contain only real, factual articles, the policy was changed to allow and encourage semi-real and unreal articles as well. Project Galactic Guide contains over 1700 articles, but no new articles have been added since 2000, which was a year after

273-445: A topic of your choosing and [e]mail it off to the unnamed "editors". These editors (to use that title very loosely) have generated a list of approximately 1,300 topics they want to include; to date, perhaps a quarter of them have been treated. ... This so-called encyclopedia gives amateurism a bad name. It is being compiled without standards or guidelines for article structure, content, or reading level. It makes no apparent effort to check

312-566: A volunteer at the Marxists Internet Archive (MIA), Lawrence & Wishart allowed the website to publish material from the MECW around 2005, but it was always an option of the publishers to revoke permission. This finally happened at the end of April 2014, when the publishers asked via email for the deletion of 1,662 files from the website, threatening legal action if MIA did not comply. Lawrence & Wishart has argued that

351-450: Is a free content , multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteer contributors, known as Wikipedians , through a model of open collaboration . It is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Misplaced Pages originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia . Lawrence %26 Wishart Lawrence & Wishart is a British publishing company formerly associated with

390-450: Is divided into a number of non-English language sections. As of 6 April 2020, the MIA website included content in 80 languages. Although each of the non-English sections is intended over time to replicate the basic structure of the main (English-language) section, in practice these vary widely in size and scope. Some of these language sections house only a few documents by Marx and Engels, while others are more extensive—for example,

429-492: Is maintained by volunteers and is based on a collection of documents that were distributed by email and newsgroups, later collected into a single gopher site in 1993. It contains over 180,000 documents from over 850 authors in 80 languages. All material in the archive is provided free of charge to users, although not necessarily free of copyright. The archive was created in 1990 by a person known only by their Internet tag, Zodiac, who started archiving Marxist texts by transcribing

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468-481: Is updated periodically. Other websites provide online encyclopedias, some of which are also available on Wikisource . However, some may be more complete than those on Wikisource, or may be from different editions. Another related branch of activity is the creation of new, free content on a volunteer basis. In 1991, participants of the Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.douglas-adams started Project Galactic Guide to produce

507-712: The Chinese section has the complete collected works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Online encyclopedia In January 1995, Project Gutenberg started to publish the ASCII text of the Encyclopædia Britannica , 11th edition (1911), but disagreements about the method halted the work after the first volume. For trademark reasons, the text had been published as the Gutenberg Encyclopedia. Since then, Project Gutenberg digitized and proofread

546-594: The Communist Party of Great Britain . It was formed in 1936 through the merger of Martin Lawrence, the Communist Party's press, and Wishart Ltd, a family-owned left-wing and anti-fascist publisher founded by Ernest Wishart, father of the painter Michael Wishart . Journals published include: Founded in 1936, Lawrence & Wishart initially became involved with the political and cultural life of

585-890: The International Brigade Memorial Trust , the Marx Memorial Library , the Socialist History Society , UNISON and Unite the Union . In August 2016, Lawrence & Wishart moved premises from Central Books in Hackney Wick to new premises in Chadwell Heath . The move was a result of a combination of increased rents within Hackney Wick due to gentrification and regeneration of the area due to

624-546: The Marx/Engels Collected Works to be reprinted in part on MIA. In an email in late April 2014, L&W asked MIA to delete the contested material from their website by the end of April or face litigation. MIA chose to follow the request. An online petition was started against the L&;W decision, and had the support of more than 4,500 people by the end of the month. The author of the petition, Ammar Aziz ,

663-690: The People's Republic of China since the website was shortly blocked in China in 2005. The severity of the attack, coupled with other hosting issues, led to the closure of the Marxists Internet Archive's main server and several of its mirrors for a number of weeks in February and March 2007. In late April 2014, the small British publishers Lawrence & Wishart (L&W) chose to revoke their permission for their English language version of

702-529: The Wayback Machine ), and one in the United States . Through 2013, a 3-disc CD / DVD volume archive (containing the material on the website) was sold, although many copies were distributed every year for free to individuals and groups in developing and underdeveloped countries. These measures were not only meant to allow easy access to the material in the archive, but also as a way of ensuring

741-543: The popular front , publishing literature, drama and poetry, as well as political economy, working-class history and the classics of Marxism . After the Second World War , the company published work from the CPGB's History Group , including early work by Eric Hobsbawm . Later in the century, Lawrence & Wishart began its project of commissioning translations of selected writings by Antonio Gramsci , whose work on

780-539: The 15th Annual Charleston Conference on library acquisitions and related issues. He said of the Global Encyclopedia : This is a volunteer effort to compile an encyclopedia and distribute it for free on the World Wide Web. If you have ever yearned to be the author of an encyclopedia article, yearn no longer. Take a minute (or even two or three if you are feeling scholarly) to write an article on

819-461: The Marxists Internet Archive faced a number of serious denial-of-service attacks , attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in their server's operating system. By January 2007, the attacks had crippled much of the archive, and left volunteers with CPU issues. That the majority of systems involved in the attack were either in China or belonging to Chinese institutions led to speculation that the attacks may have been politically motivated and directed by

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858-634: The archive varies from one section to the other, depending on the volunteers who work there, but all are built on a common basic document template. The archive includes section dedicated to specific historical topics, such as the history of the Soviet Union and the Paris Commune , as well as broader subject topics, such as philosophy . It also includes a reference section called the "Encyclopedia of Marxism", containing definitions of Marxist terms, short biographies, and historical material. The MIA

897-513: The categorization of writers, modifications to the bylaws (by 3/4 majority), financial issues of all kinds, and similar matters. Administrators are unpaid volunteers who assume additional responsibilities over certain section(s) of MIA. The MIA is incorporated in the U.S. state of California and registered with the U.S. tax service as a non-profit , 501(c)(3) organization. According to the MIA charter , its content will always be offered 100% free, in compliance with all capitalist copyright laws. All

936-568: The construction of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park ; and the convenience of the company to remain close to Central Books, who are also Lawrence & Wishart's distributor. The Marx/Engels Collected Works ( MECW ) were published by Lawrence & Wishart, in collaboration with others, between 1975 and 2004 in 50 volumes, and is the most complete attempt at rendering their work in English. According to Andy Blunden ,

975-503: The continuity of the archive. As they put it: "If the Archive is shut down by a publishing conglomerate or the government, having this information widely dispersed around the world, essentially untraceable, with the content entirely intact, is a great thing." As of March 2014, the MIA was 138 GB; it was then decided to discontinue the DVD and to distribute a portable USB hard drive that contains

1014-527: The encyclopedia, until the last update in September 2018. Project Gutenberg published volumes in alphabetical order; the most recent publication is Volume 17 Slice 1: " Lord Chamberlain " to " Luqman " , published on August 9, 2013. The latest Britannica was digitized by its publishers, and sold first as a CD-ROM , and later as an online service. In 2001, ASCII text of all 28 volumes was published on Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition by source;

1053-491: The entire contents of the MIA on it. The portable HDD has now also been discontinued. In addition to distribution of its hard drive archives, in 2008 the MIA launched Marxist Internet Archive Publications, which has, As of October 2022, published eight titles including volumes on philosophy , social history , Soviet psychology and pedagogy , and an anthology of writings by José Carlos Mariátegui , which it distributes through Erythrós Press and Media, LLC. Most of material on

1092-570: The foundation of h2g2 . The 1993 Interpedia proposal was planned as an encyclopedia on the Internet to which everyone could contribute materials. The project never left the planning stage and was overtaken by a key branch of old printed encyclopedias. Another early online encyclopedia was called the Global Encyclopedia . In November 1995, James Rettig, Assistant Dean of University Libraries for Reference and Information Services at College of William & Mary , presented an unfavorable review at

1131-419: The free reprints on MIA will affect its plans to issue MECW in a digital version in the near future, and its action is purely to ensure that it remains in business. By the end of April 2014, more than 4,500 individuals had signed a petition objecting to Lawrence & Wishart's decision to take action against MIA. In response to the criticism, Lawrence & Wishart in a statement said it had been "subject to

1170-498: The historians will be able to write learned articles about what Marx said, but the general population are going to be left back in 1975 [the year when the publication of the Collected Works began]". In response to widespread criticism, L&W issued a statement objecting to the "campaign of online abuse". The MIA is administered by a steering committee , composed of all active volunteers. The committee decides issues such as

1209-472: The journals New Formations , Anarchist Studies , Renewal , Twentieth Century Communism , and Soundings , Lawrence & Wishart are also developing their work with online books. Recent online publications have included Regeneration , on generational politics, and the Soundings collection The Neoliberal Crisis . The company has also published books with a number of partners, including Compass ,

Marxists Internet Archive - Misplaced Pages Continue

1248-759: The material stored in the archives is either public domain , under the GNU Free Documentation License , or used with the copyright holders' permission. Any work created by MIA volunteers is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The website is primarily served via an ISP in Germany , and three mirrors exist, two of them in Europe (in France and Germany Archived 2015-04-06 at

1287-465: The qualifications and authority of the volunteer authors. Its claim that "Submitted articles are fact-checked, corrected for spelling, and then formatted" is at best an exaggeration. Examples of article entries included Iowa City : A city of approximately 60,000 people, Iowa City lies in the eastern half of Iowa. It is also the home of the University of Iowa ( http://www.uiowa.edu ). Misplaced Pages

1326-466: The relationship between politics and culture has ongoing significance for the company. The first volume dedicated to Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , was published in 1971, and re-published in 2005. The mid-1980s saw the publication of works by writers who brought the insights of cultural studies to bear on more traditional political concerns with ideology, politics and power,

1365-471: The website is formatted in HTML , and the style of the documents is determined with CSS . PDF is sometimes used, especially for languages which don't yet have computer fonts or OCR software available. Many PDFs have been added for the purposes of putting up revolutionary and socialist publications, presented as they were printed. This has added to the bulk of the growth of the MIA. The markup and style of

1404-420: The work of transcribing texts resented having little influence over the way in which the archive was organized and run. In early 1998 Zodiac decided that Marx.org would return to its roots and that all writers other than Marx and Engels would be removed. In July 1998 the present form of the Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) was created by volunteers transferring files and archives from Marx.org. This led to

1443-474: The works of Marx and Engels into E-text , starting with the Communist Manifesto . In 1993 the accumulated text was posted on a gopher site at csf.colorado.edu. Volunteers joined and helped spread and mirror the main archive. However, the main site and its mirrors were hosted on academic servers and by the end of 1995 almost all had been shut down. By 1996 the website, Marx.org, was hosted by

1482-674: The works of over 600 authors. Today the Marxists Internet Archive is a recognized repository for both Marxist and non-Marxist writers. It is listed in the OCLC WorldCat catalog, and has been selected for archiving by institutions such as the British Library , Ireland's University College Cork , and the US Library of Congress . MIA has had problems with malicious attacks from online sources. Beginning in November 2006,

1521-557: Was quoted in Vice magazine: "You cannot privatize their writings—they are the collective property of the people they wrote for. Privatization of Marx and Engels' writings is like getting a trademark for the words 'socialism' or 'communism.'" Andy Blunden , a representative of MIA, did not dispute that L&W has copyright over the material. He was quoted in the Washington D.C.–based Chronicle of Higher Education : "The professors and

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