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

1. If you think people wanted you to explain what a number was, you completely misinterpreted our comments on your Complementary Arithmetic.

2. You took a survey of technical articles and found that all the authors had left. You forgot to do a control and take a survey of non-technical articles. If you had done so, you would have found that all their authors had left too. It is a feature of h2g2 that authors come and go, as you yourself appear to be doing.

My complaint about your Complementary Arithmetic entry was not that it is too tecnical, but that it launches right into the technical stuff without ever explaining what the entry is about. This means that only people who understand Complementary Arithmetic will read it. Everybody else will be put off in the first couple of sentences. You must strike a balance. Since "Complementary Arithmetic" is about a way of representing numbers and performing arithmetic on those numbers, it is worth saying that in an introductory paragraph. Since the only place in which such numbers are used is in computers, it is worth saying that too.

You seem to have committed the newbie's error of assuming you know more about everything than everybody else. Certainly you know more about the particular topics you choose to present. But that doesn't mean that you know more about the way in which they should be presented. h2g2 has probably the biggest collection of scientifically and technically competent people you will find anywhere on the net outside of a an academic website. And many of them are involved in Peer Review. So listen to the suggestions people make.

Between us, we should be able to make this ol' Guide something worth reading.

Hello Gnomon.

Nice to hear from you again.

Full reply when site settles down. It's the crib season again. Singles, Doubles and League cups to defend, so Tuesday evenings are now full.

Mind you, the conversation right next to this one in my list is "Yet another question about Basil Brush". So maybe I was wrong about the dumbing down of h2g2.

Hello Gnomon.

Nice to hear from you. I argue, you argue, we answer each other, and agree to differ if need be. I

like that, and hope you do too. You also don't give up (I'm assured), and neither (usually) do I.

As to other things, I been letting sleeping dogs lie. That is not a cop out, or an excuse for not

reading your last post. Let's leave the content of Complementary Arithmetic (CA for short) to the

review thread, as it has recently been amended. Your (1) may be true. The rest of this post is

about more general things.

Yes, I'm new here. Why did I join? It claimed to remove offensive language etc, and has a part (in

Everthing->Science) specifically to interest me. It also looked like a place where someone of

modest means, and no connection with academia, could get a few snippets published, with some sort

of credit (if only to a nickname). So, with a personal wish to record one or two things for

posterity, it looked ideal.

I am not a frustrated author. I already do write periodically in the printed medium, under my real

name (with colour photo too). This is a duty which goes with being elected to a certain honourary

post. I'm well into my second three year stint now, so at least when speaking rather than writing,

I get a message across, and do not spoil that in writing. (N.B. I am not any sort of politician,

but do represent people, often in somewhat adversarial contexts.)

I'm trying out h2g2, and did the necessary homework (learning GuideML, reading the writing

guidelines, and so on), to make that possible. I've looked at quite a few of the entries, and

generally tried to enter into the spirit of the thing. Stuff like my (now lost) Old Hairy PS, and

"Whose for Light Foot", and tried to produce some entries for the Guide. I've put them into peer

review, and picked up some things in peer review. Generally tried to be into h2g2, in fact.

The initial promise is not realised. I seem to get "too technical" and "not for Mr Average"

comments at every turn. Maybe that is true of what I write, but poor excuses for some things on

h2g2, like the omissions in the GuideML help on Tables. I tried to point these out, and got a

chewing. This tends to give the impression that there's a cabal that are allowed to know all the

workings of h2g2, but the masses must be protected from such arcane knowledge, and this wrankles.

The site is beset with technical problems. It's deadly slow, and I say that using a very old

machine. (In twenty odd years of PC use, I've never been bitten by a virus. I have only recently

gone on the net, and then because the pressure to do so became irresistable.) h2g2 has just had a

phase of not letting me log on, and logging me out once I'd done it. This followed an argument with

one of the sub-editors, which went no-where. What got my goat then, and perhaps clouded my

judgement, was the Doppler effect: theres an entry that goes straight in (isn't that nice), but when I argued that, no reply. The sub-editor in question started with an apparently false claim of ignorance, so the entire thread got off to a bad start, when I made a flippant response to theirs.

I looked again at the site. I noticed that many authors left quickly. Whether or not the

non-technical people persist bothers me not at all. If I want a non-technical conversation, I can

go down the pub, and get one complete with nuance, intonation, and all the other things out there

in the real world (in real time too). That is not why I joined h2g2. The chatroom merchants can do

as they wish, and if they enjoy what they do, that's fine - for them. The front page of h2g2 does

invite help to write an encyclopedia, and puts that first and foremost.

Now I find that some EG entries escaped the "Mr Average" test, for example "Introduction to Metric

Spaces" gives its raison d'etre as usefulness for the theory of functions and convergence. Great

start from my viewpoint. And the follow-up entries: there are none I can find. How would you write

one if you have to explain functions and convergence, for Mr A, before you can start? I've asked

this before, and got no answer.

I have had positive responses to the dumbing down thing. I have also found people worrying that

h2g2 will die on the vine for lack of growth. There certainly is no shortage of new recruits, as

any look at "Who's Online" reveals, lots of "new this week" people. However, if few of these are

retained (in any category, not just of my interests), then the future is bleak.

What are my publishing ambitions? I mentioned to you a Diophantine date thing, and journalled a

hint about fast curve plotting. I have one or two more like that - not rocket science, but not for

Noddy either. I started to lay the ground for the curve thing with an entry on interpolation. I

have no ambitions to publish anything about Boolean things, but just see that as a gapping hole in

the guide which I may be well placed to fill. If I can be bothered.

My journal had an item about responding to a Windows survey, which got a response. I took that as a

promise from me to write something. As part of my preparation for going, I honoured that promise. I

could not find the thread to attach it to, due to malfunction of the search facility. In my

off-line stuff, where I made that entry, I have copy of the survey post, so know EXACTLY what to

search for, but cannot find it. I will try again, but I've largely honoured my promise.

I have not absolutely made up my mind to go. If I had, would I bother to raise the kind of issues

in this post. Not likely, is it. I left massive clues that I would leave, just so anyone interested

would be in no doubt. It seems one or two may be.

Sorry this took so long to read.

OH

Hello Gnomon.

Sorry about all the carriage returns, which are curiously absent in the middle. Posted straight out of Notepad.

OH

Thanks for your reply, Old Hairy. I can see all your points.

I'd like to explain why I'm here on h2g2. I've always had a skill in explaining technical concepts to people who know nothing, in simple language they can understand. Or so I've been told. I find the best place I can do this is here on h2g2. I hope that people read it and learn something, and from the comments people leave on my entries, it seems people do read them. So I just keep writing them. Enough about me.

I don't know the answer to your question about technical articles. Is it possible to write a technical article which assumes some prior knowledge and get it accepted? It should be, but I am wary of such articles. I was writing an entry on the Pyrenees, a range of mountains in Southwest France. I looked them up in Encyclopaedia Britannica for some background information, and got an article on geology which was so technical I couldn't understand anything it was saying. I'm inclined to think that a geologist looking for information on the Pyrenees would not think of looking in E.Brit. So the article failed on both fronts - too technical for the average reader and not in the right place for the technical reader.

I think that the problem can be overcome by stating very clearly at the start of the entry what the article is about. If you're writing for an engineering journal, you can assume that readers are engineers and understand the basic concepts of engineering. You can make no such assumptions here, so you have to make it explicit:

"This entry describes the Bussel-Hexthorpe Ramjet engine used in hyperborean tunneling devices. It assumes that the reader has a basic knowledge of hyperborean equipment and will not attempt to explain such concepts. The entry shows how the Bussel-Hexthorpe is a radical departure from previous designs which will revolutionize the industry."

If you knew something about hyperborean tunneling, you'd be attracted by such an introduction. I also think that if you didn't know about hyperborean tunneling, you might still be intrigued enough to read on, although you wouldn't complain that it got 'too technical'.

I hope you stay, because we need good writers.

Hello Gnomon.

I'm going to unsubscribe this thread now, but stay on site a bit.

Parting thoughts

a) my tunnelling devices are gallium arsenide diodes
b) my PS has been rebuilt, but I don't like it as much as the old one

OH