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

It is working. The first entries go up in September.

yes, well, congratulations. 10 entries ready i've heard. a good 9 months work that!

spook

I'm going to stop there spook, because the next thing I say will probably break the house rules.

Suffice to say I think you are being very trecherous and deceitful.

We got 10 entries up since the (about) 2 months since we elected editors. That isn't too bad since so many of our miners are on vacation. We could do more easily, and more are coming soon.

Thanks Verc

Don't listen to these insults. I'm confident that our hard work in setting up the Underguide will show in the quality of the entries that we turn out.

Also consider that the h2g2 staff looked over various schemes that were described for promoting fiction and alternative writing (starting way back when Mina brought it up 6 or 8 months ago? Anyone remember the h2g2 storybook idea?). Because of our hard work backstage, h2g2 staff believed the Underguide would be most successful. If we skipped the discussions and planning, just rushed to start publicizing dozens of untouched entries, would they have endorsed our plan? Doubtful.

In fact, spook, you claim we've done no work or accomplished nothing. You've put 50 entries in the SOG. Was that a lot of work? If you don't reject any entries, then it's not like you had to spend a lot of time deliberating over which ones to use. I'm not sure if you're editing or modifying any of the entries, but at one point you had said that the entries for SOG would not be changed. So you must not have spent much time "working" at editing them. What was the work? You've seen 50 entries in AWW and made a list of them. What have you accomplished?

What i have done in the Spaced Out Guide:

- Created a menu system
- Started a Jokeathon thread which will become a large joke area at some point in the future
- Advertised and promoted the Spaced Out Guide thoroughly
- Written an introduction
- Taken in around 50 entries. this means:
- Copying the entry into Word
- Correcting Grammar and spelling errors
- Copying the entry into Notepad, then from there onto h2g2
- Putting GuideML on the entry
- Copying a link to the Spaced Out Guide Menu System to the bottom of the entry
- Adding the researcher to the researcher list
- Adding the entry to the Spaced Out Guide Menu system
- Created 3 entries about the Spaced Out Guide:
- Spaced Out Guide Entry Submission
- Spaced Out Guide - Q & A
- Spook's Vision Of The Spaced Out Guide in The Context Of THHGTTG Offices
- Created an entry linking to other entries of interest that aren't in the Spaced Out Guide

Please note that all of the above was done by one person, although other people have helped with advertising the Spaced Out Guide through journals and personal spaces.

Plans for the future:

- Get a graphic on h2g2 (werekitty has already drawn a quality graphic at http://clarefolkes.easycgi.com/werekitty/aaaaaaaa.jpg
- Get a named entry (long term, scheme needs to prove itself, most likely aim for in 1 year's time)
- Get more people involved as helpers for the Spaced Out Guide (i can't do it all by myself forever so i will be looking for a bit of help)
- Continue searching for entries, and adding entries to the Spaced Out Guide


spook

Okay, so the value that is added by your editorial process is that you correct "Grammar and spelling" and then add GuideML or reformat it in a way that pleases you. A few months ago when I read one of your pages about the Spaced-Out Guide, you had spelled "grammar" wrong, in the sentence where you said you might correct spelling and grammar. This time, you've only capitalized "Grammar" for no apparent reason, making it... grammatically incorrect.

My confusion at how SOG works is understandable, since a lot of your complaints about the Edited Guide and Underguide were aimed at the way editors can be judgmental or wrong about entries, and how SOG would cure all of that. Meanwhile, you're still trying to apply your own view of how grammar should be changed and your own view of how to reformat them.

I had thought you would avoid those problems that most editorial processes have by not editing things at all in SOG. But that doesn't explain it. The only explanation is that you are editing them all perfectly. You are the perfect editor, so you never have that problem the rest of us have where we change entries to fit our views. You only change the format to fit your views. And the spelling and Grammar.

I'm still curious about whether SOG accepts every entry submitted, or whether you actively search for entries with the intent of gradually running them all through your spelling and Grammar and reformatting process. If you're only selecting the best ones to put into SOG, then you are leaving other entries behind, which means that you've rejected them, the unforgivable sin that you've thrown stones at the Underguide for committing. It doesn't matter whether you give them a rejection notice or not -- it still amounts to rejection if you read them and decide not to use them.

Unless you plan to edit every entry you find and put them all in SOG, then you are a hypocrite for the things you've said about the Underguide.

i don't re-format. if someone else has already put their entry into GuideML, i go with their GuideML. if they haven't, i GuideML it as all entries need to be GuideMLed to link back to the menu system. i correct spelling and grammar to make the entry readable. i don't change words or anything. the editing process is a prety simple one. it isn't in any particular way that pleases me, it is just done simply.

the reason entries about the SOG sometimes have mistakes is because i write them straight on to the system.

i accept all entries submitted directly to the SOG. other entries i pick are usually ones pointed out towards me or ones i particularly like or ntoice as a travel through the site. i particularly look out for humourous entries, but anything submitted to me is accepted.

spook

Again, my confusion that you might reformat entries for SOG is understandable, since I read on Spaced Out Guide Q&A A1001241 that
"Copies of those entries will be made, and then edited in only 2 ways - spelling and grammar. And maybe layout, but hey, that don't really count."

When you complain about subs and editors and UG miners changing entries too radically, then it counts. When you make the same kinds of decisions, then "that don't really count." The hypocrisy is very consistent.

"the editing process is a prety simple one. it isn't in any particular way that pleases me, it is just done simply."

When other people edit entries, they are abusing power or messing up entries that should be left as the author presented them. When you make similar kinds of edits and judgment calls, it is done with a zen-like absence of bias, just "done simply."

"i particularly look out for humourous entries, but anything submitted to me is accepted."

This means that you reject some entries by not automatically including them. Writers will notice that you never picked their entries out of AWW, so they will feel that they've been rejected by SOG. (Some of them might not realize that you'll accept anything that people ask you to use.)

If you really wanted to prevent researchers from feeling rejected, you would need to accept not just the entries directly submitted to SOG -- you'd have to actively accept every entry submitted to AWW, every entry you come across, every entry on h2g2. It would be an impossible task for one person, and would accomplish very little, since people would not feel like a great status has been bestowed upon them. You just can't stamp out the feeling of "rejection" by telling everyone they're all "accepted." People thrive on conflict and competition. Without rejecting some pieces, there's no competition, no status, and no incentive for people to participate.

This is why people have been trying to tell you for a few months now that there's nothing wrong with a guide that rejects some authors. We can encourage them to keep trying, and we can remind them that rejection does not mean they're worthless people. We can tell them about all the famous people who were rejected hundreds of times before achieving fame: how Nabokov's Lolita was rejected by dozens of publishers before one finally published it, or my personal favorite story, how John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer posthumously because his mother kept submitting his novel to publishers for years after he died.

But trying to eradicate the concept of rejection won't work with something like the Edited Guide or the Underguide or SOG.

ok Deidzoeb, now you're making up things i haven't said.

1. i accept everything directly submitted to the SOG. entries submitted to AWW are not submitted to the SOG but are submitted to an Alternative Writing area where all groups can scout entries. That is not my focus. my focus is getting people to submit articles directly to the SOG. AWW is a secondary resource. i do not reject entries submitted to the SOG. just because i do not scout every entry i come across for the SOG does not mean i reject them. to reject them they would have been submited specifically for the SOG. i personally donot have the time to put every entry i come across in the SOG, and not everyone wants their entry in the SOG. in AWW i scout specific entries i personally like, which is not dependant on quality or quantity. on the rest of h2g2, if i notice an entry or something i like, i will scout it. if someone submits an entry to the SOG, i accept it.

since entries are not submitted directly to the SOG when submitted to the AWW, their acceptance to the SOG depends on whether i notice the entry, whether i like the entry, and whether the entry has been accepted into something else or not.

2. >"When you complain about subs and editors and UG miners changing entries too radically, then it counts. When you make the same kinds of decisions, then "that don't really count." The hypocrisy is very consistent."

please point out where i am against editing. NOWHERE, and i repeat, NOWHERE, have i said i am against editing of entries by the UG, so stop making things up. editing is necessary for everything.

perhaps you should re-think your argument strategy by actually replying to what i'm against, not for.

spook

I'm definitely stumped. I could have sworn you wrote it directly, but maybe I just imagined you wrote it, based on your broad hints that SOG has a better process than UG, leaving entries raw instead of editing them much (except for spelling and Grammar and GuideML). I dug through a few dozen conversation threads to find if you said anything like what I've been accusing you of, but couldn't find it. I found a spot where you suggested that the Underguide should start an email group(!), in contradiction of your recent complaint about the email group. But nothing about editing being bad.

I also found discussion of your h3g3 proposal in the earliest posts on the "Why is AWW such a dead end" thread -- which shows how concerned you were a few months ago about keeping h2g2 uncomplicated. You wanted them to create a new website for fiction. Great idea when it comes from spook, but when we work on a process that will fit into the current website with minor changes, at no cost to BBC and no extra technical changes to the site, then we're making it "too complicated."