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

Hi Zachsmind.

Excellent article; lots of food for thought, needless to say. Perhaps a few, er, official replies might help (though take these as discussion points, not the gospel; I use the word "official" in its lightest sense... ).

* Fact: there is a huge backlog of submitted articles, and I'm starting to work through them. This will take time, especially as I have already booked next week off on holiday (done way before I started as editor, of course). I don't like the current automated rejection system - I'm not even that convinced of the whole concept of rejection and I agree the "consider for rejection" joke has probably worn off now - and will endeavour to send helpful replies to submissions when I can. This will take a little longer, but it's essential.

* Absolutely, we do have a fairly confused editorial policy at the moment. That's why I'm formulating a new one, but essentially you've hit the nail on the head: what exactly /do/ we want? In a nutshell I'm happy to include articles that are (a) well written, (b) factually correct and (c) er... that's it. I don't mind people submitting things with spelling mistakes 'cos a good editor can always sub articles to read well, but obviously we'd prefer things that have at least been spell-checked.

You might notice that some of the "pre-installed" entries aren't factually accurate and are simply comedy pieces. Whoops; that's not necessarily what we want, and I understand how they can be misleading. One thing that is important is this: I don't think people should /try/ to be funny, but should let it fall out of their writing style if their writing style is like that. There's nothing worse than a joke that doesn't work, and I'll tend to delete anything that is trying to be funny but really isn't. That's what the "Don't write like Douglas" bit means; it doesn't just mean avoid writing HHGTTG pastiches, it means don't try to be funny just for the sake of it. "Good writing" is sometimes funny, sometimes not, and all I want is well-written stuff.

* I'm re-vamping the Don't Panic pages; they're rather enigmatic, to say the least. Expect to see the general level of help increase considerably over the next month or so; the concepts of forums, user pages, home pages and so on are rather confusing and need more explanation... no arguments there.

* Your critique idea is excellent, and tallies with our long-term plans; as you correctly surmise, as the number of entries shoots up the team here will find it harder to cope unless we enlarge the team. Nope, what we really hope to foster is "peer editing", a self-contained and scalable editorial system (to slip into management speak). Quite how we do that has yet to be decided, but I totally applaud what you're doing. I'll be very interested to see the results.

* This sort of commentary makes for great discussions; thanks for posting it, even if it is a long read.

Mark

Oh God is this long. Sorry. Go get a beer and come back.

"Excellent article; lots of food for thought, needless to say. Perhaps a few, er, official replies might help (though take these as discussion points, not the gospel; I use the word "official" in its lightest sense... ). "

Understood. I get the feeling TDV wants h2g2.com to be as casual as possible. That's both what endears people to the project and also what annoys the heck out of them. The laid back atmosphere is very appealing, but the fact submissions are two months behind is frustrating.

"Fact: there is a huge backlog of submitted articles, and I'm starting to work through them. This will take time..."

Your holiday aside, I think the real problem is with *your* superiors believing that only one new addition to the editing staff is going to do more than put a dent in the tens of thousands of entries to accept or reject. No offense. I'm sure you're very qualified and will rise to the challenge, but you're gonna need more than just a couple extra hands. I think you're on the right track with your next statement.

"I don't like the current automated rejection system - I'm not even that convinced of the whole concept of rejection and I agree the 'consider for rejection' joke has probably worn off now.."

I'm not certain if I understand the POINT B of this project. I think someone mentioned somewhere that maybe y'all were gonna put the chosen guide entries into a palm pilot or something. As for the website though, maybe specifying between rejected and accepted material isn't working? One man's treasure is another's trash.

I think I mentioned this to Jim Lynn before and he indicated there's plans to go in this direction (you indicate that later on in this message but I'll go ahead and attack it now.) Of course editors will mark the pages you're wanting to use for extraneous projects, but you could also incorporate a voting system into the program, allowing field researchers to rate their favorite and least favorite submissions on a scale of one to ten. Then people could use a search function that allows them to get a list of all entries by rating. Or maybe there could be an easier way for someone to link pages to their own homepage. Create a page for each homepage that consists of links they've made to other users' pages. So field researchers would not only be writing potential guide entries, but their opinions could help you editors in your decision-making processes.

"..and will endeavour to send helpful replies to submissions when I can. This will take a little longer, but it's essential."

Perhaps a way to speed up the process would be to take notes regarding each submission you accept or reject, and use that information to help you in redesigning the Don't Panic pages. If several submissions are being rejected for similar reasons, you can kill several birds with one stone by just posting a single message about why to the Don't Panic pages, as opposed to sending separate personal emails to each participant. I strongly agree that personal interaction is key to the success of this project, but such interaction is best done in the public forums, as you are doing now. This way others can benefit from your editorial comments.

Again this goes to programming, but perhaps if editors had the ability to post a message to the forums and as you submit it, you could push a button that would simultaneously email said post to the individual, this would allow you to alert the specific person you're responding to, but keep the message public. I don't think h2g2.com should be set up so anyone could email anything to other field researchers cuz that could get abused. However, editors should have that option to make things easier for you.

"Absolutely, we do have a fairly confused editorial policy at the moment. That's why I'm formulating a new one, but essentially you've hit the nail on the head: what exactly /do/ we want?"

That has been answered to a certain extent. Perhaps you can never answer that question completely because every 'rule' or guideline you set will inevitably have acceptions. Previous attempts have only led to more questions for me though, as I've already detailed in the message you responded to.

This helps:

"In a nutshell I'm happy to include articles that are (a) well written, (b) factually correct and (c) er... that's it."

By this I'm assuming we should be aiming more for encyclopedia-like guide entries. Where defining the word or phrase accurately is paramount and any humorous vignettes or other extraneous material is secondary.

I feel a brain burp coming on. Okay try to follow me here. Presently everything is the Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy or Earth or whatever. It's all in h2g2.com and accessible, however Field Researchers are submitting POTENTIAL guide entries to h2g2.com and they await acceptance or rejection. All entries are visible immediately, but are not considered official guide entries without an editorial seal of approval.

This is the brain burp: scratch that. EVERYTHING is automatically a part of h2g2.com because it can all immediately be seen upon posting it to the website. Whether or not the Powers That Be acknowledges the page seems ..kinda passe' now doesn't it?

INSTEAD, how about this? Everything in h2g2.com is automatically accepted as a part of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to Earth. Field Researchers submit guide entries by hitting the post button and they are immediately embraced by the Sub-Etha bands and delivered to all Guide recipients everywhere provided they know to look for that page. Now. What are the editors for then? What are people hoping their pages will be accepted for? Well, the Hitch Hiker's Guide is only the _standard_ repository of all knowledge and wisdom, and contains many omissions and is considered apocryphal and all that. Admittedly and perhaps unofficially, the avid reader is gonna want that instead of 'official' entries anyway because it's just more fun. It's a grab bag. You never know WHAT you're gonna pull up. However, if someone actually wants an accurate and well-written definition that has been edited and critiqued and hammered to death until it's just right, they'll want something else. A person who doesn't have TIME won't want to drudge through the Guide. They'll want something more dependable and amazing to answer their questions in as little time as possible.

A field researcher should feel they accomplished something just by posting. However, their REAL dream should be this:

To be included in the illustrious Encyclopedia Galactica! Wondrous repository of all knowledge and wisdom!

Though the entire site is all part of the Guide, only a chosen few specially selected and editorially christened entries would be collected and amassed into the grand Encyclopedia Galactica compendium, which is still located at h2g2.com but they're the OFFICIAL entries that already come up more readily. You can use them as you wish. Put them in a palm pilot or publish them as a book or use them as dialogue in the next movie or whatever Douglas Adams comes up with in between baths.

All I'm suggesting here is that you rephrase the terminology a little bit. The accepted guide entries become the Encyclopedia Galactica, instead of being referred to as 'official guide entries.' It's ALL The Guide, but the Encyclopedia Galactica would be the official compendium.

You can use the phrase Encyclopedia Galactica to represent the very best h2g2.com has to offer. You could also come up with OTHER names for other compendiums later on. If a lot of messages are discovered to be specifically about some general subject, like movie reviews or recipes or attempts at humor or poetry, and the editors happen to like them, y'all could create a new comendium and begin collecting them together for the new compendium. So the Hitch Hikers' Guide becomes an immense first draft for a potentially endless stream of other periodicals and projects.

It's another brain burp. Do with it what you will. Embrace it or feed it to the lions. I'm only trying to help.

"You might notice that some of the "pre-installed" entries aren't factually accurate and are simply comedy pieces. Whoops; that's not necessarily what we want, and I understand how they can be misleading."

This whole place is still an idea being molded and shaped. It's part of what makes this place so damned fascinating. Just think, h2g2.com hasn't even hit 'puberty' yet. The project has just figured out how to walk and is going into it's terrible twos right now. It will both get worse and get better simultaneously in the years to come, and before you know it, the website will be asking for your keys to the station wagon.

I don't think all entries accepted by the editors should HAVE to fit an anal retentive and complex set of stipulations. Each piece should be 'graded' on its own merits. You should come up with a set of guidelines you communicate to the field researchers and use that as the measuring tool, but be aware of and willing to change. Adapt to each piece. I think you're already on the right road for that.

Making room for stuff that's good but doesn't necessarily fit original expectations will help you expand the horizons of the site's purpose and future direction.

"One thing that is important is this: I don't think people should /try/ to be funny, but should let it fall out of their writing style if their writing style is like that. There's nothing worse than a joke that doesn't work, and I'll tend to delete anything that is trying to be funny but really isn't."

Will things be deleted now? I thought nothing was being deleted.

As for the 'to be funny or not to be funny that is the question' question, I know I'm guilty of that. Granted there's nothing worse than a joke that doesn't work, but there's also nothing worse than someone who wants to be something who doesn't strive for it. I like trying to be funny. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't. If I didn't try I'd never learn.

"That's what the "Don't write like Douglas" bit means; it doesn't just mean avoid writing HHGTTG pastiches, it means don't try to be funny just for the sake of it. "Good writing" is sometimes funny, sometimes not, and all I want is well-written stuff."

Yeah but it's fun to write like Douglas Adams. It just is. Even if it doesn't work very often, it's still fun.

And I must admit my writing is influenced by him anyway, just like my writing is influenced by a lot of writers and other input. People often say, "find your own voice." Dana Carvey never found his own voice. Ever heard Dana Carvey trying to be funny as just Dana Carvey? When he's being Jimmy Stewart or Ross Perot he's being incredibly funny. When he just talks as himself, he reminds me of a relative who has these REALLY funny stories that he just HAS to tell you every holiday which makes you dread Thanksgiving because you have to FACE him again.

"I'm re-vamping the Don't Panic pages; they're rather enigmatic, to say the least. Expect to see the general level of help increase considerably over the next month or so; the concepts of forums, user pages, home pages and so on are rather confusing and need more explanation... no arguments there."

Everything in reality has a FAQ now. Every television show or movie or celebrity or hobby or religious theology.. You go to a search engine and there it is. The Don't Panic pages are h2g2.com's FAQ. FAQs should constantly be re-evaluated and updated. The worst FAQs are the ones that haven't been updated since 1994.

"Your critique idea is excellent, and tallies with our long-term plans; as you correctly surmise, as the number of entries shoots up the team here will find it harder to cope unless we enlarge the team. Nope, what we really hope to foster is "peer editing", a self-contained and scalable editorial system (to slip into management speak). Quite how we do that has yet to be decided, but I totally applaud what you're doing. I'll be very interested to see the results."

Oh. Well uh, okay. AFTER I posted that Field Critic idea, I looked at it and it felt like I was just setting myself up for another fall. I'd be at it for a few weeks and then it'd be like QuadBee. Jim Lynn was real polite and kind, but he used the words 'Disney' and 'lawyer' in the same sentence and I panicked. I have no interest in meeting a disney lawyer; especially if they wear those Mickey Mouse power ties. I'd vomit all over the stenographer.

But if y'all actually WANT this Field Critic idea, we'll give it a shot. I would like to see some way of getting more specific communication on this with you editors though, so we don't go off on some tangent that you guys just tell us doesn't work later anyway. But maybe that's just how it works. We'll just go off on a tangent and if it works great if not we'll regroup and try again.

What MIGHT work is this: I ask people to respond and let me know that they want to participate in being Field Critics. However, until the Don't Panic pages get redone and y'all have a more specific yet still vague sense of what you're looking for, we don't actually do anything.

Field Critics will be able to use your updated Don't Panic pages as our criteria with which to critique each others' works. I also want each critic to have the ability to add their own two cents about a particular submission, but their opinion should be separate from specifying what works within the h2g2 editor guidelines.

"thanks for posting it, even if it is a long read."

I was once told that my longwindedness is both a great asset and a great demonic beast from the pits of hell with three heads and halitosis. I think he meant that as a compliment.

Zach, great forum you've got going here. I'm glad I tripped over it, as I feel I do with most things in this funny purple place. .

How about some imput from someone who's spent a great deal of time reading the Guide rather than adding much to it? (For the time being. Believe me, as you'll see, when I start writing, I'm very nearly as verbose as yourself!) Part of the reason why I'm reading rather than writing just now is this very confusion over the various types of entries which are made Official and why. So I decided to read a LOT first, and now I'm getting a much better idea of how the editors are trying to shape the nature of the Guide. So far I've finished reading the entries in the letters A-F and R-Z in the official index, and this is what I've noticed:

1) Editors mean it when they say they want fact before fiction. Ignore most if not all the h2g2 writing team's entries if you are looking for a model entry.

Not that those entries aren't cute and humorous when you come across them, but believe me, they DO start to bore you after a while. I kept getting so tired of getting these silly entries with little to zero content, rather than entries created by what I'd call "real" field researchers, that I went to the teams' home page and methodically read off every one of their entries until my browser had them all marked as a "visited link". NOW I can persuse the rest of the index with all of that out of the way.

2) Editors mean it when they say "write like yourself".

Sure, entries with a bit of humor get into the Guide. The editors are human and like ourselves DO enjoy the same wonderful, off-beat humor as the people who gravitate to this spot do. It's not an encyclopedia. This place does have a purpose and I don't believe it is to showcase humor for humor's sake. If it were, someone would have chained a bunch of h2g2 writing team people to a computer until they wrote the whole Guide themselves. (And then we'd be clicking on entry upon entry, thinking to ourselves "That's cute, but where does it GET me?") But they've asked us to write the Guide and they've asked us to share our knowledge and views on life on Earth.

So tell it your way: give us some facts, interesting information and don't take yourself too seriously. That's where the humor comes in. After all, can any of us claim to be the ultimate authority on kumquats, Silly String, cricket, poisonous snakes or even your own home town?

At the very least, we can tell other people what WE know about kumquats, Silly String, cricket, poisonous snakes and our home towns -- just in case tomorrow, ZachsMind or some other researcher finds a lovely gift basket full of kumquats and poisonous snakes next to his bed and hasn't the faintest idea what to do with them. The guide might then tell him: "Don't Panic", wake up, grab his towel and check his boots before he puts them on because he's probably woken up in Australia and Silly String will NOT be able to help him now!

btw. While I'm on the subject, I just have to point out that the entry on Australia http://www.h2g2.com/A53650
is probably one of the best in the Guide, and a great example of what a field researcher can do when he/she is really humming. That's what I would call a model entry.

3) There's a lot of dissention about the "scrambled eggs" approach (I think the term fits!), where the Editors combine a number of Unofficial entries into one Official Entry. Personally I think it worked in the case of scrambled eggs as well as the Universal Alcholic Table, but it won't in every case. Long live the Editors! This mixture of entry types makes this an interesting place.

4) As for topic drift, perhaps we could encourage by example a habit of taking the wacky, off-topic conversations (amusing as they are) to forums attached to journal pages and user pages? A link is an easy thing to make, and perhaps it would help those who really want to get on with conversations pertaining to the Entries and Unofficial Entries.

5) Oooohhh...I like the idea of anonymous editors who are large, oops, I mean editors-at-large, field critics or whatever they end up being called. I'm raising my hand to volunteer now.

'Nuff said. For now.

Good points all, RhymeMe. And your words as well as those of everyone who has responded so far were very helpful in my creating the Defining page for Field Critics at http://www.h2g2.com/P118397 .

AS for topic drift, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for it. I've trudged through many message boards and Usenet newsgroups over the years which devolved into an argument about topic drift. Group A would drift and Group B would complain about it, then Group A would respond unfavorably and defensively. THEN individuals C,D,E, etc would come in with their opinions, and before you knew it the original topic is horrendously lost anyway.

Perhaps we could try to teach others by example, but in my experience it's best not to argue about it and let it drift. There are times when linking to a new message thread will help, but in my experience more often than not it just kills the energy of the thread because so few successfully notice the link or care to click there. It basically kills the thread, or at least takes the wind out of it.

YMMV of course. =)

The only solution to topic drift is moderation. It's difficult in Usenet because of they way it works. But on h2g2 it's possible to take conversations that go off-topic and prune them. A moderator would be able to indicate the post at which the topic drifted and move every reply under that one into a new conversation. That way, the original conversation would stay on-topic but the drift would remain active, just in a different place. It's a neater, more workable solution that trying to point people at a new thread by hand.

We're going to have to do this in the Don't Panic forum, which is currently drowning in noise. We can move the chatter elsewhere, leaving only the real questions and actual answers.

It's another thing on my rather large list of things to do.

Has this to do with the 'Favourites' thingy you mentioned to me on another forum? - You have a lot of work in hand - good luck and I like the way it is all coming together. vegiman

My TWO PENNUTH
At:
http://www.h2g2.com/P120565
vegiman