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

How about something that will explain why Scouts are soon going to go nuts.

I HATE it when people who are almost illiterate post things in Peer Review. Scouts are supposed to be helpful and encouraging, and most every article is supposed to get Edited or we'll help the author make it into something good. But what about those idiots who write a 20 word article about Bob, their pet donkey, and post it to PR?

Or how about those people who go on for five pages about why they think love sucks because they have never had a relationship. And then there are the activists who try to denounce what they think is wrong with our society, and try to pass their arguments off as fact.

As if that weren't enough, there are those who post their article multiple times in the hope that the more they post, the more likely their article will get Edited. The PR page has almost 300 conversations, plenty enough for Scouts to sift through without these hosers cluttering it up.

Some might say that these people are probably newbies and don't know any better. That's fine; we're here to help. It's acceptable to be ignorant, because that can be fixed. But what about people who have been around a while and should know better? Those who aren't ignorant, but instead stupid and/or obnoxious? I think there should be some sort of automated way to tell someone he's being an idiot online. Maybe a "teleslap"; you click a button onscreen and a hand reaches out and slaps the other user. I bet someone who could invent that would make billions.

I like the "teleslap" idea...

I agree that there is a lot of garbage among the good articles throughout h2g2. While occasional crap isn't so bad, there should be ways to inform people what classifies as acceptable and what just doesn't even come close. Maybe they think they're being funny, and there are a few "crap" articles that are. But, submitting it to the Peer Review Page is just wrong...and I can believe why the Scouts will go nuts.

All I can suggest for the present time is to ignore them...saying nothing might be better than criticising them as I know you're not really supposed to be negative...maybe there's a way that someone else can stop this menace...

Actually, there is a pretty easy way to deal with these, though it goes against H2G2's unwritten policy.

We could (gasp) delete the offending threads.

I think some would say that's equivalent to censoring people, which means we SHOULDN'T delete peoples' threads, which means roving scouts will still keep turning up the "crap" articles, which leads to insane scouts, who will go out and buy guns and internet tracking programs and hunt down the idiot researchers and go to their houses andstalkthemandthenshootthemwhilethey'resleepingmwahaHAHAHAHA...

Or people who are non-scouts could be the ones offering non-positive comments, like, "This article sucks. What the $#@! were you thinking!?" It's not like the general populace is bound to always be polite all the time, though the culture seems to be one of helpfulness and friendliness and nonstupidity.

Another thing is that it's hard to tell just from the thread title whether the article is "good" or not. Even reading the first entry isn't enough, you have to go look at the article. If you start ignoring suspicious ones, you might miss some real jewels of obscure information.

To paraphrase a phone commercial, sometimes it makes me want to reach out...and punch someone.

Have you been reading too many of those....merely asking for information, he he he...

I agree that the threads shouldn't be deleted. And having non-scouts be rude to them is a good idea--though I still think there should be a way to teleslap those people...but don't look at me to be the rude one. I have FAR too many family members crawling around here and I'm not about to break the universal code-of-conduct for volunteer types, as I might become one someday in the near future.

..."reach out and punch someone"...I like it.

And there are some good articles with bad/obscure titles among the crap.

Another thing that really bugs me is the standard of writing in the threads. There are a few researchers out there who write a posting with little or no punctuation or capital letters and, in some cases, appaling spelling. The postings end up unreadable, and I have to skip over them 'cos I can't be bothered to spend the time decyphering them. I'd love to administer a "teleslap" to these people.

I admit my spelling isn't 100%, but at least my postings are grammatically correct and readable!

Yes, indeed. I saw one posting in which the author rambled on about when he would change his article to comments; the sentence went something like this:

"...sure I'll do it tonight oh wait, it's late over here and i'm sleepy @#$#@! it I'll do it tomorrow..."

Except the expeletive wasn't deleted. I really felt like slapping him. Even though his article was reasonably well-written, his forum posting made him sound like a complete idiot. Ironically enough, some scout more open-minded than I recommended it.

Well, to me it seems that before you look at a specific http://www.h2g2.com/PeerReview thread, you should read the relevant article. Now I'm not a Scout, but plenty of times I just copy and paste the A123456 number into the address box and look at the entry my own self. If I have questions about the entry itself I'll post them on the Entry's conversations, and if I really like it I'll post something on http://www.h2g2.com/PeerReview. Mostly on the PR threads are people who say vaguely encouraging things; I'm not the writer, so what good does reading "constructive criticism" of someone else's Guide article do me?

I prefer to read the conversation first. I like to get a feel of how good the article is before I read it. Reading the thread and everyone's comments tells me whether the article is worth reading, or if there's nothing there to read, where the typos are, etc.

It's those articles I get to first, or those that no one is willing to touch that irritate me.

When I get to a new thread, I only read the author's introduction, without reading any of the feedback first. If it's an article that has lots of scouts prowling all over it already, I'll pass on it, otherwise, I'll go straight ahead and read it. Then I'll come back and read what others have said. If I agree with them, I'll post that, and if I disagree, I'll post that, and then I'll go on to make further suggestions.

If I think an article is great, I just say so and move on. If I think an article is terrible and unsalvageable, I won't post a thing, because I can't think of a nice way of saying "this article sucks." It's the ones I find that I think have potential that I'll work with the writer on.