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

Not from the way I can see it

*See other posts*

i have yet to receive a list of pros from anyone connected with the UG.

spook

First of all, you fail to weigh the pros against the cons, you just count them. That's where you get the expression 'weigh the pros and cons' The UG pros are significant ones, but "The UG requires changes to the h2g2 website" isn't. And some of them just aren't true.

1- Entries in AWW commented on
2- Entries receive official status
3- Entries receive front page exposure
4- AWW page is re-done
5- More creative entries are likely to be written. This is not just me speculating, by the way. Ben compiled statistics that showed that more entries were submitted to the AWW in June and February- when the miners were the most active. This is actually beneficial to you spook
6- The AWW will be kept cleaner. There are 300 entries in the AWW because no one was moving them. And we didn't make any presumptuous moves. A lot of them were one liners
7- It helps promote interest in the creative community of h2g2 as a whole. A rising tide lifts all boats. This is a major one. Currently, there are two sides of h2g2- EG and community. I'd like to see EG, Community and Creative.

There still aren't as many, but weigh them and take off the false cons.

you removed one-liner entries? and those are the best!

spook

There was one that was something like 'I went to a Metallica concert but I can't remember it because I was drunk'

Would you like it?

well, , i'm not sure. i mean, it needs a lot of grammatical work doing, you know, like, a, , full stop at the end and all, so it may be too big a project to do right now. maybe after i expand...

spook

Understand why it's being moved then?

That's the worst. There are some similar ones.

i still believe the entry has potential to be a classic!

Have fun.

"i still believe the entry has potential to be a classic!"

These kind of objections must pop up constantly in Peer Review, but no one pays much attention. Why? Because there's an editorial process and most everyone accepts it.

The purpose for having editors at magazines is to separate the wheat from the chaff. The reason people pay money to read magazines is because no one wants to read everything in the world. They don't want to read a lot of poorly written stories, so they pay for a product that results from editors. Not all readers or editors agree, so that's why there are thousands of different periodicals with different styles and focuses. When editors can't pick stories that people like, their magazine goes bust. When readers can't find any magazine that publishes stories they like, a few of them get together and start a new magazine.

A lot of your complaints are not specific to the Underguide, but could apply to any editorial process. If the author of that modern classic "I went to see Metallica but can't remember cuz I was too drunk" had submitted it to Peer Review, then researchers or scouts would have presumably rejected it. You might have announced in Peer Review, "i still believe the entry has potential to be a classic!" If that's a problem, then it's not unique to Peer Review or UG. It applies to anything with editors.

The problem with SOG and the problem with your criticism of all editorial processes is you don't understand that readers want someone to tell them what's good, and they want some articles to be rejected because they don't want to read everything. If a story gets past lots of editors, chosen from among thousands of entries, like the Pulitzer or Booker Prize, then readers assume it must be very good, because it's been judged better than all those thousands of others that were rejected.

If you tell readers "I'm going to promote every piece of writing that I find, and you can come here and read them all," then the service you are providing is basically a list of all entries that you've run across. Readers will see that you are not weeding out any of the poorly written entries, or the well-written but boring ones, and they won't want to read them all. Unless I've misunderstood the idea behind the Spaced-Out Guide, or unless you run it differently than the way you've described it, then the only difference between reading entries featured on SOG and reading entries randomly is that you are in charge of the SOG.

I don't mean to put you down, and I don't mean for you to stop the SOG if you enjoy putting it together. But is the SOG just a list of the unedited entries you've read?

If SOG does not reject anything submitted to it (as you have claimed in the past), then SOG must be just a list. If SOG is not just a list but a selection of your favorites, then you must be rejecting things, even if you're doing it quietly or not realizing that you're doing it.

As far as I understand, spook's purpose with the SOG is more for writers than readers. He wants to encourage writers to write by accepting them.

You're contradicting yourself here, by the way spook. You claimed that an entry should be accepted by someone so that it has some sort of home and the author isn't discouraged. The UG will do this of course, with good entries, and the SOG with not up to UG quality.

So why does the SOG want UG quality entries?

Because the SOG doesn't judge quality, so there will be a range of high quality and low quality. and any entry can be made good. take that one liner:


"I went to a Metallica concert but I can't remember it because I was drunk"

Create a "Handful Advice" Section, then a subsection of "Major Don'ts", then give the entry the subject of "Metallica concert", then add beneath the personal experience which you put in quotations the word "DON'T" in bold and you have a quality entry!

it's all about presentation.

spook

Sounds like a lot of editing and changes from the way the author had it. Is that bad editing of the kind that you complain about when EG or UG does it, or is that just reasonable editing, which coincidentally only happens when spook does it?

It's all about hypocrisy.

where did i ever say UG and EG editing was bad?