h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How does the update procedure work? Well, that's a good question and I think we're still trying to come up with an answer for that, so anything I put here will no doubt become outdated and useless by the time The Powers That Be figure it out.

However, at the moment, this is how I THINK it works. I'm prefacing this with the fact that I may be completely wrong because if it turns out I am wrong I don't want people being upset with me. And please understand our focus so far has been to fight the backlog and catch up on all the entries so we can eventually guarantee a two or three week turn around on approving or rejecting submissions, instead of the three or four month turn around that has been up until now. We're making a lot of progress, but updating entries cannot be top priority yet because of this. That'll change soon, but one mountain at a time.

Any user pages that are made will NOT immediately become considered for this skydiving guide entry even if you put SKYDIVING in the subject header. Why? Well I tried to do a search each time I was sent a guide entry to edit, in order to see how many other pages out there dealt with the same topic. Then I tried to incorporate all those other pages into the one I was editing.

This grew insane, and the end result was a hodge podge that I personally wasn't proud of. Mark said just to concentrate on what was put before me. This makes the job easier and the results were better. All pages that are submitted get looked at in their turn, in the order they were submitted.

If you want something added to an approved guide entry, the best way to do it is to include it in the forum of that Guide Entry, preferably with a note in the subject line saying something like "please consider this for an update" or words to that effect. I'm talking the ACTUAL text you want included. An alternative would be to write up a whole user page, submit it, and then leave the URL in the forum for the already approved guide entry. However, if you're going to do all that, why not just leave the text in the appropriate forum? It's less effort for you, and we're going to reformat it with GuideML anyway when we edit it.

Eventually, and this is not top priority at the moment and like I said the Powers That Be are still hammering out the details, but EVENTUALLY we'll go back through all the approved guide entries that need updating and we'll scrounge through the forums to find any points that other field researchers have found for deletion, addition or alteration. So again if you want to make a note for updates, please use the forum of that guide entry. This way we can keep each topic under the same roof.

In fact this has happened already to many entries, but it sort of happens sporadically. We don't have a system for it yet.

Also, this will be helpful: If you have a lot of information, or you just would like to see a re-edit of one paragraph, or what have you, start a NEW conversation in the forum so your idea is at the top of a given forum. Then others can kibitz and add their two cents to your idea for an edit and it will make it EASIER for us to see when we start scrounging through all this. If you put your idea for a retread of the paragraphs at the end of a long chat-oriented thread, it's possible we won't see it because we'll look at the first ten messages or so, notice that people are just trading puns back and forth in that thread and we'll move on to the next one. If you're not responding directly to what someone else said in a forum you should start a new thread anyway.

And again, anything that a Powers That Be person says that supercedes any of what I just said is more accurate than what I just said. Did that sentence make any sense? I need some vodka.

If you have any questions beyond that, leave them in this thread, or email me at [email protected].

Emailing me skydiving stuff but not putting it here in the forums won't work. My email box is cluttered already, and I'll just lose it. Putting it here in the forum gives it a better chance of being included in future updates. There's never a guarantee it will be included, but it will be considered, when we find time to do all that.

Thanks for the info; I'll now pull my metaphorical finger out and sit down to write something

I'll break it down into sections (it was crystallising out like that anyway) and post them here for comments / additions / etc.

By the way, how many skydiving researchers do we have here? (waits with bated breath)

Azimuth