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

If Peer Review is here to stay (at least in the foreseeable future) why not include a button in alabaster and a link in the goo to take us there directly?

Yes, I know the ad banner is doing that at present, but I want to get rid of that too - see the related forum on this page.

Cheers!

- X

Yay, good idea. 'Submit this entry to peer review' sounds a bit unwieldy but I'm sure somebody could come up with a shorter, catchier button title. And it could fill in half the form for you, to prevent all those annoying incorrectly submitted articles that end up in the sin bin...

I think Jimi means just a button to go to the PR page - though your suggestion is good too, Peregrin! I'm all for that.

Also, it would be nice to have a button for The Post, which I think should be a key part of the community - maybe with some reminder on the day it comes out?

The Peer Review threads could be automated from each entry's edit page.

How I see it working is this. After you have created an entry and want to get it looked at, instead of going to the Peer Review and entering the relevant stuff yourself, you go to your entry and click a button marked "Peer Review". All the relevant information can then be extracted from the entry and creates a new thread for that entry in the peer review. That way all threads are in a consistent format.

I've not forgot about the little description for the entry either. There are two ways of doing this:

Either
a) Have a box next to the peer review button for your description
b) Utilise the guideML tag

I think Peer Review was invented because when there was a handy "submit" button people were just submitting everything they wrote. Having to put a bit of effort into it should make sure that only things that are worthwile are considered.

Actually, it was more to move the work of deciding which entries are acceptable out of the towers - and into the hands of us researchers - so that the process scales a little better.

Myself, I'd like to see the "contribute" and "read" buttons merged, so that we effectively have one button for edited stuff, and one button for community/unedited stuff. Also, I'd like to see the edited stuff updated more often (and I don't mean the stuff that's on the front page). For example, what about a "featured university project" or somesuch? Or a "Classic Guide Entry"? Or "Five Ideas for new Entries"? Or a link to the next entry to be updated? That kinda stuff...

That reminds me, I've been noticing too for a long time that a large majority of the edited pages need updating in some way... perhaps a new volunteer force could be recruited to do this? It doesn't really fit in the subeditors field, as it's more research and writing based. Maybe part of the University.

How about a button to the stats page? at the moment it's only visible to those in the know.

I'd like a button to The Post too, and while were at it is there any possibility of a button to the h2g2 quiz?

FABT

And can we please have a Login button?
Please?

¦M¦

Hello,

I really like this idea to automatically submit entries for Peer Review. I think it's pretty excellent, even though/because it will increase the number of articles to look through. Might as well quit my job now.

However, I think there are a few things worth noting. It should be explained that it is perfectly okay to post your own entries to Peer Review (this button will take that), but it is also acceptable for others to nominate your entry (some sort of notification process might be nice). In addition, I would like some pithy explanation of what is or isn't appropriate for Peer Review (encyclopedia-styled articles are okay, poetry however nice isn't). It might be more interesting to have a general Submit button which would then have differing actions possible based on what the user has written: "If your article is a factual guide entry, click here to post to Peer Review. If it's a short story, click here to post to the Literary Guild page..." A bit crudely sketched, but perhaps you get the idea.

While we have a bunch of formal societies, I'm wondering if we should institutionalize a few other areas for collecting entries that aren't factual for the Edited Guide but still worthwhile parts of the Guide as a whole. So we could have /Stories/, /Poetry/, etc. I'm not suggesting that we take clubs away from their founder (that would be bad), but we elevate their status. How does this sound?

Yours,
Jake

*has visions of needing to buy a larger monitor just to fit on all the buttons*

Seriously, the post has a link on the Read page, you can type in the easy to remember URL, and you can bookmark if both of those are two slow... what do you want?

Next time, I'll edit better. I mean to say that we have a bunch of informal clubs on H2G2. Some are related to particular areas of interest that unedited guide entries might fall under. What I'm suggesting is that we have more formal notations for these parts of the guide and ACEs responsible to keep the area from going moribund (eg, the Film Society has seemed a bit dead lately).

Yours,
Jake

So many choices for new buttons, to which I would like to add Guru Bear's Sub-Ethernet Radio show (should it ever come to pass).

My question is, what's to stop ALL of these possible buttons being created as part of a customisable set of options in Preferences? If we're talking about a ground-up redesign here, would a user-defined selection of buttons on each page be out of the question?

NQAH (pondering)

Ming Mang has a good point, a login button would be very useful. It's annoying having to go through the register page to find the login page.

or even better, have a user name and password box at the side on the front page if you're not logged in. then, on a public computer, you'd only need to go to the front page (easy address to remember), type in your name and password, and you'd be logged in. Much, much quicker than the currect system.

Actually, I'm all for fewer buttons... How about just "My Space", "Who's Online" and "Don't Panic" in the Goo...?

For everything else, I'd shift the search box along to the right a little and insert a drop-down navigation list. That way, as new ideas are added to the list, you don't have to redesign the skin!

"Goo users stick together..."

The probelm with having various buttons to submit to different sections of the Guide is that the researchers' focus can get side-tracked away from the Edited Guide and start writing for other stuff -- however nice it may be to have these extra sections, the Edited Guide, is, really, the whole point of h2g2.

As a notebook user, I have to agree fewer buttons the better. A javascript-style drop down menu system would be ideal. It may even be possible to make it 'fixed', so that it does not scroll with the page contents.

Tal, ( squinting at a 12' screen. )

As a subeditor I find that I've got lots of entries in my Guide Entries and Edited Guide Entries list. The only way of browsing through them to the earliest ones is to click repeatedly on the Show Older Entries links. Perhaps the conversation listing system could be nicked and incorporated into the entry lists, so there's a convenient little line of dots showing the pages of entries.