The View at h2g2
Created | Updated Jul 11, 2003
This week the View celebrates it's one year anniversary. It also links to a worthwhile page about the future of Peer Review, discusses what it means when you assign researchers to articles, and wonders at the many mutual appreciation fan clubs at h2g2.
The State of Peer Review
The number of threads on the Peer Review page is up a bit from 194 last week to 209 now. The Sin Bin went up slightly from 215 threads to 222 this week. And the Writing Workshop also went up from 347 threads to 356.
There are 11 entries waiting to be assigned to a Sub-Editor, compared to 16 last week. 77 have been assigned to a Sub-Editor for work and haven't yet returned, compared to 87 before. And 83 have been returned and are waiting for their turn on h2g2's front page, exactly the same as last week. Thanks again to Mark Moxon for sending these last three statistics to me.
The longest a thread has gone without comment at the Peer Review page is a bit over six weeks, compared to five weeks last time. And 81 threads have received comment within the past week, compared to 80 before. All in all, it has been a rather typical week for h2g2's Peer Review system.
But this is just on the surface. Look beneath, and you'll find a lot of discussion going on about what Peer Review should look like in the future. The h2g2 Italics are seeking comments about how a more fully automated system might work. I highly recommend popping over to the Design For A New Peer Review System page to add your own thoughts and opinion.
Researcher Fan Clubs
One really neat recent development has been the addition of many fan clubs for prominent members of h2g2. These are now collected into a single place, the Directory of Researcher Fan Clubs. There are an astounding 28 researchers listed with their own fan clubs already. And it looks like more are still being added.
If you don't see your name listed in the directory, it doesn't mean you have to feel left out either. You can still visit The Mutual Admiration Social Club for a general love-in that will happily involve you. This latest development seems distinctly h2g2-ish to me. Two rounds of love and appreciation for everybody!
About Those Buttons
And now to quickly revisit a topic from last week. The Sub-Editors and Scouts have new buttons to push, but alas these buttons don't do everything in the world. The Scouts miss the open discussion prompted by sending their picks into the email list, but they are still quite free to discuss their picks if they so choose.
The Sub-Editors, meanwhile, wish they could change an entry after they have pressed their button. And some would like an email sent to the author after they have completed their work. But as Mark Moxon pointed out, these things have not really changed from before. The Sub-Editor couldn't easily edit a completed entry after sending it in by email either. And as for the email to authors after the Sub-Editor is done, it was pointed out that some Subs prefer to retain their anonymity and like it just fine the way things are.
I think perhaps we forget how difficult site changes can be. A shiny button makes it seem so easy. And it is, to us. But it can be quite hard to make that button work. And perhaps it's just as well if the button doesn't do everything in the world for us. Just a thought.
Researcher Lists?
A recent update to h2g2's features has left some people a little perplexed. After you have added an entry to h2g2, you now have the ability to add researchers to the list of contributors for the entry. The 'Edit the Researcher List' feature prompts you to put in the researcher number (minus the letter U) to a box at the bottom of the entry. You can also remove a listed researcher, though the system won't allow you to have no researchers listed at all. Rather, you will be listed as the default Researcher if you try to list none.
Of course, this change makes it easier for people to openly collaborate on entries that are not destined for Peer Review. Very importantly, it also changes the copyright status of the entry in question. Once a researcher has been added, they then share the copyright with the person who input the entry to h2g2. (This second person will be listed as the entry's editor, and perhaps also as a joint author.) If someone were to try and sell that entry to another source, the sale would have to be agreeable to all parties listed.
After this new tool has been used, the entry will list multiple researchers, or alternatively it will list a different author than the editor. You can see an example of this last phenomenon on this page, where the h2g2 Post Team is listed as the editor of this column and I am listed as the writer. To do this, I deleted the h2g2 Post Team number from the researcher list and added my own in.
Because of this last scenario, readers at h2g2 should learn to recognize whether the Entry Data box says (Edited) after the entry's ID number. Don't be fooled into thinking an entry is Edited and has gone through the Peer Review system just because the writer and editor aren't the same person. That is no longer necessarily the case.
The View's One Year Anniversary
It really has been a year since I started this column. A lot has happened since then! Here's a quick review.
The old Queue editing system was replaced by Peer Review, prompting me to eventually change the name of this column. (It used to be called 'The View from the Queue.') The new system has allowed a lot more feedback between wannabe Edited writers and h2g2's readers.
It took so long to change from one editing system to the other that my contest to guess when it would end lasted several months. The old system finally ended in November of last year, and Loonytunes won.
h2g2 went down from a high of 8 featured Edited Entries per weekday to 5. More recently, the University of Life system has added an occasional spike to the number of featured entries.
There have been several updates to h2g2 in the past year. Probably the most useful of these in retrospect was the change that allowed you to visit the most recent post in a thread instead of the first post. The most fun change has been the addition of many new Smileys last July, and more again a couple of weeks ago.
h2g2 experienced the horrible outage known as Rupert starting this January. The return was slow instead of sudden, but was well enough underway for the Post to run again at the end of March. The outage prompted many stories, poems, and songs of h2g2 addiction and sadness over it being gone. The email that was supposed to be sent to announce h2g2's return has still not gone out.
h2g2 returned as a part of BBC Online, prompting some changes in the way the site is run. The h2g2 employees moved into BBC offices, and debate by Researchers got heated about such issues as Moderation, inability to include pictures in entries or links in conversations, and trouble posting anything in a foreign language.
The Zaphodistas finally organized and created a petition for desired change in the Moderation system. More than 75 people signed. As far as I know, the petition has received no official response.
Most sadly, Douglas Adams died on May 11th. The outpouring of emotion at the site was so high that neither the h2g2 Post nor my column could talk of anything else. That was the only week my column went without the usual statistics.
This takes us up to the present. These days, talk of Moderation has slowed down. Instead, we seem focused on improvements to the site and to the Peer Review process.
A lot has happened. But one thing has not changed. h2g2 has remains a vital community and a source of great original content dispensed on a daily basis. When I began my column, there were 1737 entries in the Edited Guide. Today there are 2865. So over 1000 Edited Guide entries have been added over the course of the last year.
When I first wrote, there were 796 entries in the big homogemous Queue that held all submissions. While entries now have a lot of different places where they can be within the Peer Review system, I get a total of 958 in the system now. Really, that's not such a big change for a year.
And here's another neat thing. There were about 56,500 registered users when I first wrote this column. We're up to over 85,500 now and climbing. Considering the increase in membership, it seems the editing system is more efficient now than it used to be. It is also producing longer entries that have received critique by more people than when I first started.
If h2g2 has improved in its mission to become a guide to everything, I like to think that The View has improved in its mission to be a guide to h2g2. While the column originally focused on nothing but the editing process, it has slowly expanded to include writing tips, site updates, dissent coverage, and occasional fun features. I hope to continue this expansion of coverage in the future.
The Next View
Next week, the View is going to play it by ear. If you know any of interesting or worthwhile topics I could cover, please let me know. You can start a conversation below, or you can pop over to my personal space and use my email address to send me a private note.
Written by Fragilis the Melodical.
Feel free to check out my past columns.
