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

First, before I respond to your suggestion, I would like to say one thing: WELCOME BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You have been sorely missed by at least one traveler
OK, with that out of the way I would like to volunteer to be one of the critquers. I happen to agree with your comments on monkeys, hamlet and encyclopedias. also I might add that from what I have seen so far that has been excepted I have one response, WHY??????? I mean for example, we have an article on how to make scrambled eggs, if I wanted to learn how to cook I would have bought a cookbook! It does not take a genius or someone with great writing skills to write a description on eggs and scrambling them. Sorry, it just bugs me that there seem to be so many entries out there that have had a lot of thought and work put into them only to be rejected because we have no guidelines on what in the world THEY are looking for. Yes, I agree that it would be nice if we knew what it was we were supposed to be doing in the first place instead of just doing the hit and miss method, and you would think that THEY would want us to know so that they were not bombarded with articles that THEY do not want in the first place. OK, I will get off of the soapbox now and let you have it back as you seem to know how to use it so much better than I. Keep up the good work and let's see what we can do to get this idea of yours off the ground. I for one am going to post this link into all the forums that I can so that everyone knows it is here and has an opportunity to read it and if they would like to, become involved as I for one feel this is a great suggestion.
monshari

One disadvantage researchers have is that they tend to operate in local backwaters. There may be some brilliant monkey out there, who has already outdone Hamlet to the nth degree; but the odds are against one coming across him/her at random.There has to be a mechanism that guarantees, at some point, a chaps stuff will have it's day in court. Faith in an impartial chronological progression of judgement is essential (recent entries notwithstanding).

As I see it the problem breaks down into basically three components:

- There are no clear criteria for acceptance. This could have been provided at the outset. One assumes that the editors themselves are working within some sort of framework.

-Not enough time is invested by researchers in actually reading guide submissions. When they are read, they are not critiqued in a way that might lead to improvement or encouragement. This is partially due, as you point out, to the feeling that no one is really in a position to make informed criticism.

-The volume of submissions has exceeded everyone's expectations. The result is editors overwhelmed by their workload, and researchers frustrated by the amount of time it takes to receive any kind of acknowledgement.

I agree with your conclusion that there is a need for greater involvement in the selection process on the part of researchers. Informed researchers, helping each other, could reduce the amount of chaff submissions and improve the overall product. This would reduce the demands on the editors, enabling them to play a more proactive role in the collection of quality material.

Two points here:

1. Researchers should have more input on which articles are accepted.

If I said this before, I was in error. And no doubt that sort of thing will happen often, as I'm a brainstorming type of person and say a lot of stuff just to throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.

Let us assume for a moment, that the Powers That Be DO have some sort of plan. Perhaps this recent interview DNA had on that breakfast show has a few clues. If they were communicating this before, I wasn't listening properly. That's no surprise.

Perhaps DNA wants h2g2.com to be some sort of 'how to' place I think. A location where you go to learn how to do things or where to go for things. Perhaps the criteria for an accepted journal entry isn't elusive, but is not readily noticable to the researcher. Maybe they're looking for a combination of entertaining and enlightening, and also words that incite conversation. They want springboards that encourage people to add their own two cents to the forums at the bottom.

I mean we're trying to write well, or write with some kind of impressive edge, and all they're looking for is a springboard.

2. Not enough time is devoted by researchers to reading other researcher's work.

This is a very important part of the dilemma. I'm guilty of it too. If you go to the http://www.h2g2.com/index.cgi and look at pages that are waiting to be rejected, you'll see numerous duplicate entires. There's three Shakespeare pages for example, and I wrote one of those myself.

Perhaps it would have been wiser for the latter two authors to submit their words to the forum of the first page, so that all words in h2g2.com about Shakespeare would be under the same umbrella.

A good rule of thumb I'm trying to do now, is to do a search for what I want to write about before I write about it. Then if there's no other pages about that topic, I can start my own. If someone has already started a page on that, then whatever I'm thinking about regarding that topic can be added to the forum at the bottom of the already existing page.

However, if I don't search and read other researcher's pages, I'll be duplicating the efforts of others.

Suggestion: whatever you're in the mood to write about, try searching on that subject first. Try to write whatever you want on someone ELSE's page first, and if you can't find a suitable place for what you want to say, make your own page.

Maybe we're placing too much emphasis on making the grade. It makes sense, I agree, to write about subjects that haven't already been covered. But not at the cost of not expressing yourself on some personal favourite theme. I don't know. Writing a user page doesn't preclude offering help to someone else interested in the same subject. My interest in this thing lies in seeing that everyone gets a fair shake. That's all. It would be a shame if people are giving up just because of the backlog. If I can be helpful in alleviating the problem, I'm happy to do what I can for the common good.

as usual Zachsmind you have brought forth a very good point.
thank-you for your recent brainstorming episode as it always seems to contain a great deal of useful observations.
let me state for the record that i may not always respond to what i read but i do look at it and think if nothing else. i guess my grandfathers words from long ago have stuck in my head to this day, "fly never lands on man with closed mouth". i guess what i am trying to say is this, it is the same as you stated on reading other topics before starting your own, if you have your mouth open (or fingers typing as the case may be) before you stop to hear what someone is saying (typing) then you will most likely end up doing nothing more than imitating a broken record. i don't know if what i just said made much sense or not, i am trying in short to say that maybe we should look before we leap and then we would in the end have a much more enjoyable experience while in this site.

Very good points, Monshari.

John, you said: "I agree, to write about subjects that haven't already been covered. But not at the cost of not expressing yourself on some personal favourite theme."

I think we can do that. I think perhaps people don't generally realize that the forums at the bottom of every page are EXTENSIONS of the page they originate from. If you're reading a page someone left about Margaret Thatcher, and you notice the original writer completely skipped over her college years which is a topic you happen to have studied, you can add what you know to the forums and it's the same thing as having that information on the topic's user page.

So you do get to express yourself in a personal way. Does that make sense?

Thanks zach for the link to the index page. I didn't know there was one. This will be helpful, as you suggest, in deciding the type of subject matter to write about. There should be a link on each user page. Or at least a suggestion to refer to it.

i believe the index.cgi is a relatively recent creation. I'm sure Jim Lynn and the Powers That Be will incorporate it into the goo as soon as is feasible for them.

Hrm... "JIM LYNN AND THE POWERS THAT BE"

Sounds like the name for a rock group, doesn't it? Like Huey Lewis and the News or Josie and the Pussycats... waitaminute!

yes, it does sound kinda like the name of a rock group
as for the link you provided, i am heading over to my page now to place it there for anyone interested so that they may access it easily. i think that once it is known by all to be there that it will quickly become one of the most used sections of this site. thank-you for the link zachsmind as until you mentioned it i did not know it was even there

I may be wrong in this but I don't think he wants to direct it too much. He is probably already conscious of his potential for godlike powers within his "creation". Then there is his user name which is the source of all life, and people quoting him in a theological forum, to demonstrate the death of God(DNA is an atheist if you didn't know). All the above are good reasons why he is taking a back seat. There is too much potential for a cult of personality on a site like this.
The model for this guide is supposed to be the guide from the book. We start with a collection of useful information about hitch hiking (Like Ken Welsh's Hitchhikers guide to Europe.), then as people try the books advice, they send in additional information about places they've been and what happened when they tried other researchers ideas. What I think DNAs idea was, what would happen if this updating carried on for millenia with the aid of database tachnology. Due to peoples cumulative experience you eventually get an open source encylopedia of everything. Have a look at K.Welsh's book if you can, it manages to be both entertaining and useful and grows between editions with field researchers comments.
So unlike the fictional guide, which was supposed to grow from a usefull book, this one is growing from a core of DNA quotes and DNA like quotes on the initial pages. Variably entertaining or not, seldom useful. The researcher's then make their contributions, and I think we would all agree we are not as broad based a group as we could be. Most people start out with pages on their pet hobby horses, I think to broaden the base of contributors we need to make our contributions more useful. The scrambled egg thing is a good example of this. It's a surprisingly interesting subject, and you dont need to have read an SF book from the 1970's to enjoy it.
I hope that last sentence eventually can be used to describe the guide in general.

I've thought of that, taking something you know about and adding it to an article written by someone else (or taking something someone else has said and adding it to your own, but I only see this happening with people who, well.."know" each other, y'know? But you went over that...

But it does seem like the best way to better entries... whether or not they get accepted doesn't really matter, because if you can't find an entry on something you search for, it does go on to user pages, right?

What annoys me is they say they don't want entries that are "trying to be funny" but I've seen some accepted entries that have NO relevance to the actual subject at all, and aren't even that funny. I've resorted to writing anything about any subject I feel like writing about...from really really dumb, inaccurate stuff to long, in-depth articles. I haven't recieved anything from any of the editors except yet another little message from the new guy repeating the "how to get your articles accepted" verbatim.

GRR

Yah, me too.... this is just frustrating though....

And usually, the articles I read are very in-depth and well-written, and have been submitted for 7-8 weeks, and seem to be overlooked for..well...egg recipies. ::sigh::

One of the issues with duplicate entries, is that sometimes people don't check, or even if they know, they want to try an entry themself. Like with Dragons, there are 3 entries awaiting rejection. One is mine. I knew about the others, yet went ahead. Why? Because it's a topic I love, I thought I could write a better article since I saw the strengths and weaknesses in the others, and it's just something I wanted to do. People are going to different articles, because people have different takes on various topics, completely different in some cases. It doesn't always give you the same satisfaction just to post what you know in an article forum than to have your own, with your name, your thoughts, not just lost in a forum of postings.

Another reason for the several articles on Shakespeare, Computers, Microsoft et al was the severely broken nature of the search page, for which I profusely apologise. Every other day I would look at it, try to use it, swear and say "I'm fixing that thing tomorrow." But somehow I always seemed to have other things to do.

Now it works more-or-less correctly, it's actually possible for researchers to do that initial check before they write their magnum opus.

There are still some tools you really need to make this Guide work properly. Voting is one. We're going to implement some kind of voting system, but we haven't fixed how it should work. Since it's all tied up with the kind of peer-review you're thinking about here, I'd be glad to have your thoughts on how you'd like to see voting work.

But remember, my decision is final...

Voting, eh? Well, there would have to be an easier way to reach the entries if you're going to have people vote for them, because right now the only people accessing sites are h2g2 "friends", who would of course rate the entries better than maybe they deserve. There are some people who just write articles and don't participate in the forums, currently they would go almost unknown unless someone decides to click on every name in the "who's online" box, and I'm sure not even I, the great Fenchurch, have enough time for that...

Maybe five entries every few days or every week or something, put up on the front h2g2 page for voting so everyone who wishes can review, but that would be slow, considering how many entries there currently are...

Maybe everybody could have a different list of user pages to have a look at on their home page when logging on. Randomly selected from the outstanding submissions. Not to vote for though, just to increase the variety of pages looked at, and then contribute to discussion forums if interested.
Voting systems (otherwise known as popularity contests) to get entries made official give to much power to groups of friends, who would intentionally or not often vote for each other.
I'm sure more editors would help. To JL, is the AI editor program DNA talked about on TW a soon to be reality, or a long term goal (pipe dream).

That's a very good idea...I still think voting is a good idea too, I think the friend bias could be curbed by a voting matrix... content, clarity, depth, well-written... it's easy to say "wow, this article was great!" even if it wasn't, but if you have to vote on individual aspects of an article, I think it would discourage perfect scores for a non-perfect work... I mean, I don't think there are very many people at h2g2 who would write a completely obnoxious article and actually get a bunch of people to vote it into the guide...and besides, I'm sure the editors would still look at the entries, just those with higher scores would have priority.

Jim Lynn's Idea of voting could be a good Idea - But voting can be fixed by a group working together.

Perhaps you could give marks out 10, set in the goo, and an id can only vote once per page.

The top 5 pages shown on the front page rather than the top 5 forums.

I hate it when a page is shown on the front page and you get sent to a chat forum. I would much prefer being sent to a page others have recomended. vegiman

How about a link on the h2g2 front page that takes you to a CGI indexed list of titles of pages submitted that day? At least it would mean we could have a gander at a heap of stuff without the '5 most...' forums filling up with so much off-topic blather.

On another note, I worked on a website a while back which backended a programme featuring the 'father' of the web Tim Berners Lee. He believes that the reason web searches are so crud is because so few people have gone to the bother of marking up their HTML pages with sensible meta tags. Apart from the porn sites that manage to tag every single sex word known to man, woman and beast.
Maybe when submitting an article we could have some checkbox type system that would allow us to mark up whether we consider the page put forward to be 'humorous', 'sober', 'factual', 'conversational' etc. Then the h2g2 search engine could be upgraded to allow filtering out of any categories we don't feel like reading. If we're in a 'silly' mood we could go look for something silly. If we want 'facts' about 'Texas' then we can find them without superfluous stuff.
If a researcher submits a page without checking boxes then that page could appear at the bottom of hits from a filtered search. If you want to search 'unfiltered' then everything would have a fair crack of the whip.
So I guess what I'm saying is that if some sensible mechanism is in place to allow submitters to 'target' their posts then maybe there won't be any need for editors to edit submissions at all and everybody's happy - if you're in a glib dumb sarchastic mood you go search for it and if you need to know something useful you can still find it.

I dunno, I quite like the anarchic start to this site but I guess it can't carry on like it has been or it may end up as just another mess like the web has kinda become.

Sorry about the length of this post I got a bit carried away.

hello, i am going to keep this short i promise.
it may be a stupid idea but, i was reading the concerns of everyone on this page about partiality and thought that maybe somehow we could have the entries anomynous to everyone but the powers that be at h2g2. just a thought, as i said, it may be a dumb idea but, i thought, "what the heck", why not mention it because you never know 'till you ask. this would however, now that i think of it, would mean that once submitted they would have to be removed from the user page until accepted or rejected to keep all of the entries anomynous. oh well, may not be a good idea but i thought i would post it anyway just to see what everyones thoughts on it were.
monshari