In Reply to Mr Cynic
Created | Updated Jun 20, 2003
Here is a reply to the questions raised be Mr Cynic in last week's Post.
QUOTE:The Towers never revealed any substantial information about the waiting time for approval.
We could have missed the question among the piles of emails and messages that are left all over the place for us, but did you ask us? I can't remember being asked for the statistics, especially as we don't actually have many to hand (something we're working on, by the way).
Anyway, thanks for doing research of this kind, it's great to see that Researchers are concentrating on having a look at the Guide itself as well as pondering the usual range of topics - Banana Slugs, Duct Tape, Interpreting James Joyce's Ulysses, and the like! There are currently 1161 laudable and interesting submitted guide entries in the queue. And here's the current situation in dealing with them...
I think that 'The average waiting time was higher by a couple of weeks than in December', because we all had a bit of time off over Christmas... not only due to the festive season (one too many Whisky Macs, I'm afraid 8->), but also due to the serious batch of flu that hit the country. We have been trying to catch up ever since.
A few weeks ago we did, indeed, begin to have a spring clean - looking for entries that had been resubmitted, any that had fallen through the net, that sort of thing... The tools that we've had to do this have, up until now, been rather manual. We've been literally finding the last entry that got sent out by hand, and picking the next 10 off the pile to send to the Subs. That's partly why some entries have been missed, and we're sorry, honestly. I'd also like to add that until we do something about it (which is soon),works in progress which were started on, say, 1 August, but were submitted
in December will have a date stamp of 24 weeks, not 6, which kind of
unbalances the statistics a bit.
But now we're testing a system which will, eventually, be able to send out the oldest entries to the Subs automatically. We're going through a testing stage of the new Sub-editor tools at the moment and once things have been smoothed out, in theory, the batches that are sent out to Sub-editors should be sent out in date-stamped order, with no gaps, anywhere. Which will be nice :-)
Then, of course, there's the recruitment of the new Subs, which is sure to speed up things. We don't know for sure how many we'll be able to welcome, but, as you say, give them a chance to settle in, and just sit back and see that queue go down!
Reply from Anna McGovern Deputy Editor, h2g2
