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

Hi there.

My answers

Do you think h2g2's new site features are useful?
Yes. Very. It's clearly much easier to recommend something on site and to be physically unable to reccomend something that has been already recommended by someone else.
Also, I've noticed that moves to entries, sin bin and writing workshop happen more quickly now and this can only be a bonus.

Have you gotten a chance to use the new buttons yet?
No, but I've pressed and had a look at what happens.

Will writers notice any change in how Peer Review behaves?
I suppose that depends on how often they post to peer review. I hope they don't notice too much difference as the rules on recommendation haven't changed, just the way it's done. As I said, the binning and moving of articles more efficiently will be the most obvious change I would imagine.

Do you think the Peer Review system will become more efficient or speedy?
More efficient yes. Speedy - not so sure. The rate determining step is not the recommendation its the 'peer review' itself and how good the article is when it is submitted.
I doubt there will be much change in the speed. One thing that may improve the speed is the more efficient removal of unnecessary threads (you can tell I like that bit can't you )
With less chaff to clutter the place up the articles will be more easily found and scouted out.

Any other comments would of course be appreciated.

One slight criticism I have is that with no threads on the scout forum about recommendations anymore it will not be easy to see if an article has been recommended then rejected by the editors.
This may cause confusion. I guess that if an article up for recommendation has been rejected by the editors then they should post to the PR thread and say why. It would still be nice to use the old 'search archive' facility on the scout forum

Anyway, thats my 2p

Orcus

Thanks for your thoughts, Orcus. And yes, I do agree that writers will be helped by the more efficient removal of dead threads and those that don't fit in Peer Review. While Scouts are notoriously willing to sort through tons of threads to find a couple of good ones, your average Researchers is not.

Do you think h2g2's new site features are useful? Yes. Orcus already gave the reasons :-) * Have you gotten a chance to use the new buttons yet? Yes. It's a bit easier to do the recommendation as there's no need to copy&paste the entry's A-number into the eGroup posting. The PR thread number must still be provided, but this might change with further development of the tools. * Will writers notice any change in how Peer Review behaves? Yes. The posting from the h2g2 Editors (Congratulation and move back to the entry) will *allways* be the first notice that the author gets to see, because the two emails (one for the author, one for the Scout) and the Editors' note go out simultaneously. In the 'old' days the Scout would get first notice, hop into the forum and deliver the message which I think is somewhat nicer. * Do you think the Peer Review system will become more efficient or speedy? As Orcus said: the Scouting itself is the time consuming thing, recommending is (and was) a matter of seconds. * Any other comments would of course be appreciated. I'm trying to keep track of the Peer Review, but as things are now, I can't know whether an entry has been recommended . I'll elaborate on that, if I may: - Only if I'm subscribed to the thread do I get to see the message, and can take out the corresponding record from my spreadsheet. - As it is now, I can't even tell from the entry itself (the 'recommended' tag isn't there any more), nor from the author's space (also, no 'recommended'). - The ComingUp page... I don't know why it's empty right now. - The search engine *does* show the 'recommended' again (for a few days it didn't), but search is quite slow. - The link in my spreadsheet doesn't help either: PR links have the following format: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F48874?thread=123456 The F48874 part makes it a PR thread, and the 'thread' part is a unique identifier. If the thread is moved out of PR then the F48874 part will change into something else (eg, F57153 for the Workshop) -- but only in the h2g2 data base. If I copy the link into the navigation bar then h2g2 combines the thread ID with the 'PR' part (like it is stored in my file) and tricks me into believing it was still there. Bossel

Thanks for your opinion, Bossel.

Does anybody know why the 'recommended' situation has changed?

Mark spoke to me briefly about the 'Coming Up' page. He said that the page had been manually constructed before. An Italic had to go in to add and remove entries. Now that the recommendation process is automated, he felt the old manual update method wasn't a good idea. He'd like to have an automated 'Coming Up' page, and I'm sure that's on the infamous To Do list somewhere.

Yes, it's on the List, but the current method seems to have been abandoned