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

That seems a reasonable proposal. I'd vote for it.

I'd like to offer my support to your campaign. There's no way that an entry should become a edited without the author's knowledge and agreement.

P.S. I think your entry on adapting books into films is excellent - a completed version would be superb!

Sorry--I just received this as I've been away from the computer for a while (5 weeks, to be exact ), and I just wanted to thank you for your kind words. This little idea of mine is so grass-roots it's not even funny, so the more people who know the better! Thanks for your support and spread the word!

Just out of interest, had you changed your email address at all? As I thought that if the scouts found an entry they liked they posted to the user page of the author, waited a week, then if no answer they sent an email to the address in preferences, and then if no answer they got on with it themselves.
I'm not saying this is the case, but if not, it should be.
Otherwise I'm quite happy to join, as I'd hate to see something of mine that was not ready fiddled about with by someone else just because I couldn't get to a pc for a while. I'd rather it waited until I came back, so I could write it and submit it myself.

Nope--I had changed my email addie yonks before any of this happened (to my easy to access and always available no-matter-what Hotmail account). The really funny part of it is that I'd been with h2g2 essentially from the beginning, am friends with a goodly portion of the people who help run it, and the one time I'm gone from the site for longer than a month is the time they go changing everything around.

I spoke with Peta and Anna on several occasions about this incident and they both expressed to me that while it's "polite" to notify the author that their entry is being considered for the guide, it's not in any way obligatory. Even if there is no response at all, the scout is urged to move ahead in the ascribed manner to have the entry made "official". No one had notified me whatsoever of the decision to "officialise" my entry--if they had, the sub-ed wouldn't have needed to put all the time, effort and research into completing it as she did. (Ask Mikey the Humming Mouse about this subject--she made it quite clear that subbing it was a major pain in the tookus.)

Essentially what happened was someone saw the IDEA I had come up with and thought it would make a nifty entry. If you had seen the raw material I had written before it was edited you would have laughed--I did. It was laughably unfinished. The other ironic thing is that my entry on Strokes (which I am ever so proud of) is credited to me and one other writer... and the piece is very nearly exact to the one I had sent to the Peer Review (one or two sentences were grammatically changed). Yet someone else (the sub-ed) finished and added greatly to the "Books into Film" piece and she is not credited as being a partial author of that entry? Hmmm....

In h2g2's favor, anything that you write on here is, for all intensive purposes, theirs. That hasn't changed since the "Beware the Leopard" days, and you still had to sign your life away when you joined the site. So they have every right to "fiddle". The real problem, as I see it, occurs when that right overrides common sense—why would h2g2 want to have half-written, poorly researched articles as a part of its guide? I wonder how many other people have gone through what I did and just aren't as "vocal" as I am (or didn't realise what was being done to them)? Where is the line drawn between end user license agreement and intellectual property, and if one even exists can there be a happy medium between the two sides?

The world may never know.

D'oh... I almost, forgot...

Thanks for helping, Mina. Spread the word!

If the scouts pick unfinished entries, then they will start losing the subs! As they won't want all the work. I'm lucky, everything I've put through has hardly needed any changes at all. But then, I didn't go offline and leave half finished work here. Maybe I'll write it all in a text editor if I'm likely to go off on holiday! The really odd thing is that I've never had an entry turned around so quickly!

*goes to point to this page from her entry*

My fiancé was one of the original hand-picked subs on h2g2 (and a rather lazy one at that ), and he always said that the best entries for the guide were those that needed minimal "subbing"--those that could essentially stand on their own. I sort of got an inside peek at the subbing process through him, read some of the REALLY awful entries that people were submitting and some of the really excellent ones that needed nothing more than a spit-polish and shine. It was pretty obvious which ones would make it and which ones didn't stand a chance. But that was on the old system, based solely on hand-submitting and sub-editor judgment. This new(er) system is a whole other animal...

It has very good points which far outweigh the bad (a community aspect which involves more people than just the sub and the author when choosing guide entries, it takes pressure off the subs to complete all steps in the review/editing process, etc..) The only thing that's missing from the process is a "DO NOT SUBMIT" button on the edit page, or some other flag that would halt the submissions process until further notice from the author. It's essentially a question of who has the better judgment-- the scouts and peer review or the author? One would hope that the peer review would have enough sense to not push through an uncompleted entry, but that has already been proven false by my experience. (And they WERE in rather a hurry to push my entry through, which made me feel guilty enough to let them do it. Are they in that big of a need for guide entries?)

If anything, the stink I raised over my entry might have been enough to warn them off from doing this to someone else in the future. But there do seem to be quite a few h2g2 members who are a little too over-zealous to have a huge collection of subbed/scouted entries under their belts. The best advice I could give you would be to out a big, happy warning over your entry: "Work in progress! Do not submit!" until a better system comes along. That *might* do the trick.

Amanda -- don't want to interrupt a private conversation or anything, but thought you would be happy to know that the there will soon be a way for entries to be flagged as "works in progress", which will make it technically impossible for a scout to recommend them. I'm not sure when this will happen, but it should be relatively soon (i.e., within a few months, I would think).


Mikey (who actually *did* briefly quit being a sub-editor over the aforementioned incident....)

Hurrah! Thanks for letting us know, Mikey.

And not interrupting at all, as this is meant to be a sounding board for anyone with ideas to improve the current submissions process. Although I'd like the AAEEIO to have been responsible for the change, I seriously doubt it's the case... seeing as how it's essentially me whining and a few people who listen.

But anyway--yay!

Amanda (who still feels sorry that Mikey had to sub that article)