More on this subject:

• Vegiman's Two Cents
• Field Critic FAQ

Why Did I Do It In The First Place?

Recently, I attempted an experiment which was warmly recieved by some and coldly ridiculed by others. In the past I have learned when I incite such emotional polarity it usually means I'm doing something right. However, at a certain point I realized the futility of that particular venture. So where was I to go from there? Give up? Walk away? Put my tail between my legs and whine? Or perhaps try to constructively figure out what went wrong? I had already written several submitted guide entries for h2g2.com, but the editors hadn't rejected or accepted any of them and I surmised they would not have time to do so in the near future. I decided continuing to write guide entries for the purpose of being accepted or rejected was a waste of everyone's time. Others were coming to similar conclusions. There was a cry for chat rooms in h2g2.com. People were looking for an altnernative to waiting. They wanted an option that created more content for h2g2.com but didn't necessitate being accepted or rejected by anyone.

Back to Square One

That's what the QuadBee idea was supposed to be. Instead of writing nonfiction guide entries and waiting to be rejected, people could write short stories and be included in the anthology within days. The original idea evolved into a dinosaur and has since become extinct. Start over again. What void did QuadBee attempt to fill? Does that void still exist? I have struggled for weeks with this dilemma: h2g2.com is designed for participants to submit guide entries to a group of editors too busy trying to keep the engine from blowing up to get out and push. People submit guide entries and wait to be rejected. At first this was an amusing concept, but it quickly gets old. And when an entry is rejected, it rarely gets rejected with a reason attached, so people then resort to guessing. Without understanding why it was rejected, how can one learn to write stuff that's gonna someday get accepted? Like an infinite number of monkeys hammering out Hamlet on typewriters, the Powers That Be are expecting us to guess until we get it right. That's what this page is about. The forums below are for people who want to attempt correlating data and clues from what the Powers That Be say, and from that glean a more educated guess: hypothesize with us what exactly it is the editors of h2g2.com are looking for.

Taking Lemons and Making Lemonade

Ideally, to make h2g2.com work they need a heckuva lot more editors than they have. More than they can afford. An editor is a paid position. The Powers That Be can only hire so many of them. This place is also in a state of flux. It's going through growing pains and we haven't seen the last of it. This could be a bad thing. However, depending on how you look at it, it could also be a good thing. It's just beginning. In fact this is a thrilling time to be here in h2g2.com. It's exciting. Lord knows what's gonna happen next. While we wait for the Editors At Large to get their sealegs, isn't there something else we can do? I was brainstorming in email with Monshari. I came up with the idea of creating a new user page (which is what germinated this thing) that could start the ball rolling. The Don't Panic button is helpful, but also enigmatic. I've looked this over quite a few times, and perhaps we can piece together some facts based on what is offered. Things you can do with h2g2.com include 1) Use the Guide, 2) join in the forums, and 3) make your own stuff and put it on your homepage. The Guide isn't finished yet, never will be finished, and if you type something in the search engine which you'd like a definition for there's a good chance you'll still not know what the something in question means when you're done reading. There's duplicate efforts for some topics, and absolutely nothing for others. Few are on the same page regarding anything. This is good. More perspectives increases knowledge about topics, but the volunteer Researchers are not always researching what they say.

The forums are great but are presently being used kinda like a complex series of chat forums. They are intended (I think) to be extensions of the original guide entries, but there's no topic police so things often get carried away. Personally I like it when things get carried away, but it's not very helpful in relation to the needs of the h2g2.com project. You can make your own stuff and put it on your homepage. Yay. A lot of people do this and it's great, but it amazes me that we find time to read everyone else's stuff on top of it. It's obvious some people don't. The trick is to try to do both, but who has time? I think we have something backwards though. Some people seem to want to write user pages for their own homepage BEFORE they go out and see if anyone else has already started discussion on that subject. Early on I was guilty of doing that too, because I didn't know better. I think we're supposed to do it the other way. I think we're only supposed to write our own user pages about subjects if we can't find a place elsewhere in h2g2.com where others are already gathering to talk about said subject.

What Do They Want From Us?

Slacker wrote a page back in May about how to avoid rejection in h2g2.com. He said, "...one of the most effective ways you can get feedback on your articles is to ask each other." This is a good suggestion. I tried this when I started; I must admit I gave up. Early on when I did critique others I was thinking to myself, "who the blank are you? Thinking you can tell these people what's what when you don't know? Who the blank do you think you are?" I kinda stopped doing that because, good intentions notwithstanding, I don't think I was being very helpful. Furthermore, when other people critique mine, I am thankful but they don't know what the editors want any more than I do. Slacker goes on to explain some examples of things they definitely are not looking for by way of guide entries. They don't want fiction.

They don't want people pretending to be aliens from other planets. This is the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but they don't want any reports that read like they're from Betelgeuse or Sirius B. That makes sense. They want the Hitch Hiker's Guide to Planet Earth. Why didn't they call it that? They want this place to be a repository of knowledge. Maybe it's just supposed to be a HOW TO kinda place. How to eat a sandwich. How to drive from one pub to another. How to make a nice hot cup of tea. How to drive your landlord crazy. Maybe that's it? They want you, whoever you are, to write what you know, to the best of your ability. The theory is if everyone does that, eventually this place will have a bit of knowledge about everything. This goes back to that theory involving the infinite number of monkeys hammering out on typewriters. What they didn't realize is you also have to have an infinite number of editors to trudge through the results of the hammering. Like searching for an unknown quanitity of needles in an unknown number of haystacks, not only will you eventually get Hamlet along with a buttload of gibberish, but you'd also eventually get the Encyclopedia Britannica, Shakespeare's Hamlet, a number of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories and directions to the Taj Mahal from California. Oh, and a recipe for Chocolate Moose.

They don't want us writing like Douglas Adams. Well that takes a lot of fun out of it doesn't it? Even so, they want us to write like ourselves. They want us to write about what we know, and they want us to be ourselves. This is fast sounding like the description a junior high school coach once told me. He took me aside and said, "if you just be yourself you'll be fine." I then proceeded to strike out, fumble, get checked, miss the goal, double dribble, and damn near get my teeth kicked in. I'm trying to read the minds of the editorial staff and I just can't do it.

You Obnoxious Load of Dingoes Kidneys Will You Please Quit Rambling About How You Came To Some Mad Revelations and Just Explain To Us What You Have In Mind???

Certaintly.

I propose we try to help the editors without getting in their way. Let me reiterate before we go any farther because this is the important part and the only way to make this work.

I propose:

1. we try to help the editors.
2. we don't get in their way.

It is going to be very difficult to do both at the same time. We can't editorialize. We can however, CRITIQUE. In fact that's already happening. However, there's no consistency. There's no logic behind it. People are sometimes offering constructive criticism but it is not conducive to whatever the editors have in mind. I've looked at many of the pages which the editors have in fact accepted. I can't find any commonalities. In fact, I've seen pages the editors have rejected and I can't really tell the difference. However, perhaps several heads working on this, we can accumulatively come to some conclusions. From these conclusions, perhaps we can set up a list of things that the editors obviously are looking for. We can put this list somewhere in h2g2.com, then others can look at said list and start critiquing fellow researcher's submissions based on criteria which is consistent from one researcher to the next, at least as much as this is plausible to do so. Criticisms can be easily posted at the bottom of the page being criticized. The submittor of said page could then read the criticisms and decide whether or not they like the criticism and edit their own submissions accordingly. In theory, by the time the editors got around to reading that page, it would have already gone through two revisions, twelve spell-checkers and a bah mitzvah. Less work for the editors; more fun for us. The articles, again in theory, would be closer to what they are searching for in the first place.

So what we need first is to get a group of volunteer researchers to scour through those articles which have already been accepted. Awhile back I made a partial list where I tried to figure all this out on my own and I gave up several weeks ago, but it's as good a place as any to start. I ask the volunteer researchers to go through any and all h2g2.com pages which HAVE BEEN accepted by the Editors of h2g2.com, and try to come up with a descriptive list of things the editors are definitely looking for. Spelling is an obvious example. They want no misspellings. Are the majority of accepted guide entries amusing in your opinion, or is humor unimportant? How about how the term or concept is defined? What similarities do you find? Examine the size of a given accepted submission. Do they tend to accept more short pages or do they prefer longer ones? What do you think? All volunteers need one page to report to each other with. I recommend we use this page for the time being. There needs to be a central location where everyone can be "on the same page" regarding the concept. Once we have a working list of guidelines to use as a benchmark for criticising unaccepted pages, volunteer researchers go through and start reading unaccepted guide submissions at their leisure. After reading, compare said guide submission to the list mentioned above, and post a criticism to the bottom of said guide submission.

Please tell me what you think by adding your critique of this page below. Ask any questions, offer ideas, solutions, or just say you came by and read it and have absolutely nothing to say. If you leave a note telling me I'm longwinded, I'll probably respond by telling you I don't know and then stick my tongue out at you. Constructive criticism is mucho appreciated. Please feel free to brainstorm with me. We need more pieces of brain.