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

...here comes a real bright spark:

A19918461

Nice!

D'you know, that's the first time I've been in PR for several months. I just don't go there any more and I didn't go any further than the entry and its (currently brief) thread. I've got no interest in it these days.

I have been following the 'Is PR slowing to a standstill' forum that's suddenly jumped back to the top of my postings list though. Very interesting reading it as a former insider. Sometimes people take things far too seriously, and I count my former Scout self in that description.

After participitaing in that forum, do you think it's too late in the day for F66763?thread=3896732 ?

I dunno. There's a degree of Luddism (and proud of it) among a few PR regulars that I encounter in other walks of life which makes me want to roll my eyes and shake such people very hard when I meet them. They'll be 'never-adopters' as opposed to early-adopters. But I think there are others who'll eat it up.

I've got pissed off with PR as well. The only reason I am pursuing this project is in the hope it will encourage real *writers* as opposed to people who think that contributing to a site like this is merely a matter of performing a periodic evacuation of their mental bowels. There is one author in PR who I got particularly pissed off with of late. It was the entry about how to make one's own petrol: factually inaccurate and dangerous as well. I think they've also written other informative entries about cat skinning, falling out of planes and performing exorcisms. What's that phrase about 'a wise man speaks because he has something to say'?

I don't know if GuideDog will encourage better writers or not - it could go either way. On the one hand, having to things the hard way (ie, having to code everything instead of using a WYSIWYG editor) puts off people who are lazy and who think they should have everything handed to them on a plate. People like that aren't necessarily all poor writers, however, although they're more likely to be the sort of people who would be awkward in PR, I think. But so are people who are good at coding - geeks can be just as bad-tempered. I blame the whole 'RTFM' attitude of much of the web on the fact that it was originally populated almost entirely by imperious geeks who have no social skills and who can't understand that not everyone in the world has the same skills or mindset they do. Geeks embittered by the fact that they were probably bullied at school and have never had a girlfriend, but now they find there's a place where they think they can be some kind of of a god - 'Don't brass off the sysadmin/webmaster'.

Yes, the Internet was like that in its early days. I didn't understand what RTFM meant until about the twentieth time that I'd seen it, which was about a week after I started using the 'net in earnest.

The problem I have with GuideDog is now that the lustre has worn off h2g2, is it 'too little, too late'? And, more importantly, what is it going to do for the site? Sure, it would be really nice to have a standalone WYSIWYG editor but if the site isn't going to attract new talent then there's not a lot of point.

Coming back to 'imperious geeks', I came across a lot of that attitude when I started the project off. One potential contributor, who could have helped a lot, refused to have the .NET Framework on his machine on principle despite the fact it was the obvious choice of technology for the project. He no doubt saw himself as taking a courageous stand against the Microsft behemoth. I just saw a prat who didn't want to get his hands dirty. And most of them still don't: all they want to do is to muck about with Linux and Java and not actually *produce* anything that might be of use to the ordinary folk who would like to contribute to this site.