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

On the other hand, the present situation suits nobody very well, so some change would definately be good. Some unsatisfactory entries get removed from the review forums, some entries get moved to the WW, some are just left in PR. Sufficient are moved to the WW to stop it working terribly well. Sufficient are removed completely to reduce the Flea Market flow. Sufficient are left in PR to clutter it up. If we *do* keep the WW as is, we should do one or the other: Sitting on the fence would be the worst of all worlds...

-Martin (imo)

"If we can do some database trickery to get entries that have been through review forums with an AWOL author, and submit them to the Flea Market automatically, then please do remove the Writing Workshop (and good riddance). This is the best solution, imo."

I agree, but unfortunately, as the system works, this isn't possible. We could re-write it to do this, but this would be a long term feature request, and won't answer the question about what to do with the WW now.

I'm stuck on this one, to be honest.

At least renaming them is easy, so I can do that. What are the final requests for name changes again? Dropping the Writing from AWW and CWW?

Earlier I was defending the WW as a place where researchers occasionally post things that they seriously want help with. Lucinda or someone said that people who want help could find it in other places, or through informal contact on their user spaces, etc.

When I thought about this earlier, it seemed like a bummer that researchers might lose this meeting place, and I didn't think informal contact would work as well. But a workshop could still exist without h2g2 staff formally maintaining it. If the WW were closed and if people still wanted a serious workshop, they could create a place on their own and it would eventually attract attention. It wouldn't need endorsement or promotion by the staff any more than Lil's Atelier or "Wind Force Twelve Abaft the Beam" have needed it to become important spaces within the community. (Not sure if enough people feel a need for this kind of workshop right now, but if more people become interested later, they will start it on their own. In fact, you could hardly stop them if they had the will to do it on their own.)

So that eliminates my objection to the WW being closed. Dust off the wrecking ball and tear it down if it will streamline the PR system.

Fadookie, your posting would surely *not* have been rejected if you had submitted it to PR in the first place. Many an entry has been put into PR in really un-recommendable condition and has improved considerably there.

The purpose of the Workshop has been taken over by PR some time ago, and I've stated earlier that it is a common observation that s/he who posts to the NotWorkshop *has* read the Guidelines and all that is lacking is the confidence in the quality of hir own work.

The WW was intended to be a place for unfinished pieces that need a helping hand from fellow researchers, right? So how do I interpret Ashley's (hi there ) initial posting to *PR* here: F88727?thread=180114 ? Tells me that Ashley knows where to get attention and where not.

Lucinda, there hasn't been a move to the WW for quite some time now, although some proposals have been made. There aren't more than a handful of soon-to-be FM cases in the NWS, therefore a database query or clean-up tool won't dig out more than these 3 or 4 pieces. 90+x percent of the rest are entries from researchers that are still active but have abandoned their pieces.

Subcom, the proposal wasn't made to streamline anything. It's just that the WW is a dark hole and a posting there won't get the attention of more than three or four researchers (at the moment, that's rather three than four because Gnomon is on holidays).

The fact that it's a dark hole or eyesore isn't really harmful to anyone, just sad, sorta misleading if people expect to get a lot of help there. But people wasting time in WW when they could have posted to PR seems slightly harmful, especially if they get discouraged by hearing no response in WW and decide never to try it in PR afterwards. (Calling it "harmful" is a little weird, but I'm thinking in terms of arguments against the status quo needing to prove some kind of "harm.")

Mark, is there any way to disallow authors from unsubscribing from their own PR threads while in PR? That would encourage non-AWOL researchers to read their PR threads and maybe even update their entries.

Or is that not a problem anyway?

-Spike A.

great idea Spike! I know there are at least two such cases in PR.


Subcom, that's precisely the point. The damage is the discouragement from getting nothing, rather than what the blurp on the WW page promises (or what some Scouts promise when requesting a move to the dark hole).

Having just been through the whole list (AWW, CWW, WW, FM), I spotted that every entry on the list had had their last comment within the last week or two.

While I would welcome features like automatic removal to the flea market on all of these pages, and an enforcement of having to remove your entry before unsubscribing, I would recommend that we do nothing precipitous until we see how it goes.

perhaps a test period of a couple of months, to see if WW gets better?

and of course, those in this thread could always pop along to it and subscribe.

"Having just been through the whole list (AWW, CWW, WW, FM), I spotted that every entry on the list had had their last comment within the last week or two." -- Er... are we talking of the *same* Review places? Have you gone further than the first 20 postings listed?

> "Lucinda, there hasn't been a move to the WW for quite some time now, although some proposals have been made."

Yeah. I suspected this, because I hadn't seen any, but was rather hoping that I'd just not seen the ones that had been moved, hanging round the alternative workshop instead. So the Flea Market is already living on borrowed time, since it won't get any more entries, save the pittance from Peer Review. So I'll add my vote in favour of scrapping the Writing Workshop.

I'd like to just say how nice it was that this change of policy was properly announced and discussed before it happened. Like to, but I can't, because it wasn't.

Hello all,

I haven't taken the time to read the whole thread here, (popped back to page one to see the early exchanges) but I do have some comment to make.

I have a genuine problem that I tried to use WW for it's intended function and failed to elicit much feedback.

The reason I needed WW was that I am trying to put together a uni project on the French revolution and can't get the benefit of feedback from the h2g2 reviewers - Uni entries aren't supposed to be *allowed* to be submitted in PR.

Now, I gave up at the time after putting 2 entries on the better known revolutionaries into WW and getting little result. But I am wondering if I couldn't post my project entry-by-entry through PR with a disclaimer asking for it not to be considered for selection by a scout.

You see my problem - I want feedback on entries that *are* intended to go into the EG but *without* going through PR.

As things stand, WW is intended to cater for this need, but I agree that it does not 'do exactly what it says on the tin'.

No dramatic suggestions, just chipping in my exp of WW, really. Oh, and hoping for some feedback on my idea of doing a 'limited' PR run on my uni entries...

seeya
spiff

I agree with much of what you say Spaceman. I personally wouldn't have a problem with having the odd university entry in peer review, so long as it was clear that they were not for recommendation. Perhaps something in the name to make that clear, e.g 'The History of rasberry Jam (University of life entry), or something like that.

Also, I agree with Bossel's proposal, to abolish the WW. I think the division between WW and PR doesn't really serve a useful purpose. The entries in both WW and PR are the same sort of entry, but at different stages of completeness, so could do with being looked at by the same sort of people. Certainly there are few specialist skils required in particular to help in the finishing of unfinished entries, that don't apply to helping in the finishing off of entries. Rather the visiting of the forums is probably more down to habit, as many researchers probably just don't find the time to visit WW. I must admit that I have rarely visited it (or CWW, and AWW for that matter).

I also think it is in many cases difficult to judge how finished an entry is. I think I thought my first entry (A591383 - The British Parliamentary system) was finished, but it required a lot of work on it, with many additions, and re-writes, to bring it up to scratch, and in retrospect it might have been better suited to the WW, although I doubt I would have gotten the many responses I did if it was there. Also people probably make the decision where to post their entry partly on where it could get most people's attention, rather than level of completeness. Given that, the split in the types of entry that get submitted to each is not always that clear cut.

Also, I think that many entries that are not fully finished could do with attention of the large number of researches that regularly visit peer review, to help them develop into entries that are more finished, and give the writers the encouragement that they need, rather than being left ignored, which is more likely for entries in WW due to the seemingly lower number of visitors. Also the restricted number of visitors means that you are less likely to get the broad range of perspectives you can in Peer review.

Basically, I think that Peer review could take on much of the role of the Writing workshop, and that the writing workshop can safely be axed.

what's the project on? If you want to get feedback, there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve the WW... (Personally, I don't really see the point in Uni Projects, but there you are)

what's the project on? If you want to get feedback, there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve the WW... (Personally, I don't really see the point in Uni Projects, but there you are)

Hiya Lucinda,

The proj is on the French Revolution, and the main advantage in the Uni aspect of it, imo, is having all the entries cross-referenced and indexed together on a single page.

it's at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A685668 if you're interested, but don't worry, I'm not asking you to invest hours in it unless you are genuinely interested.

I guess I'll send them through PR anyway, with a disclaimer as mentioned above. Can't see what harm it would do.

seeya
spiff

I'm probably missing the point here, but I don't get why unfinished entries in Peer review shouldn't automatically be moved out. Like Ashley's quoted earler in this thread; he submitted it before it was finished.

Jau-æmne, dopey after a stressful exam

moving them out *would* be the right thing to do if there was a *working* workshop as a destination where you could expect the entry to benefit from some feedback. That's what made me write posting #1 and change (my personal) policy for unfinished PR pieces. As things are, getting moved to the NotWorkshop is nearly equal to being dumped.

Have you mentioned it to the h2g2 politics forum? (A582211) What about the French Connection? (A694497) The historical society? (A240058) That'd be three different groups of people who might have things to say, and all those clubs would probably appreciate the traffic.

Harm? Wastes the time of Scouts looking for picks. People looking through Peer Review may not want to comment on a university project - if they did, they'd be looking through the university projects page, wouldn't they? It's the sort of thing that just one person doing is tolerable, but if everyone did it would get very annoying very fast.

-X

My remaining problem is what do i do as a subeditor if a scout picks an unfinished entry, because its already in peer review? could one implement something preventing unfinished entries being picked? (sorry if I've said this before; still dopey)

I see no harm in having all sorts of threads mixed up in PR -- that's the case anyway

IMHO, reviewing in the University is hampered by two things:
a) there isn't much traffic, thus people might glance over there every once in a while only, just to see that there's not much to see.
b) In an initial state with lots of skeleton entries there isn't much to do a review on.

This would be better if there was some indicator of readiness on the faculty's page, or if a Project's index page was kept carefully updated (I'm guilty here!)

The solution is what Spaceman Spiff says: to choose an entry and steer it to Peer Review. I could think of two options there:
- either take a piece right out of the middle which perhaps wouldn't stand on its own, so people would *need* to follow the links to other entries of the project
- choose one that can be read as it is and point out that there's more where that came from.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of *doing* it right away and see what happens...