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

parp! oops sorry! anyway so theres not going to be a job for me then....... well at least I tryed so then any chance of something else! I need something to do.

You can still look for problems in Edited Entries and report them at Feedback / Editorial. You could comment on Entries in Peer Review. Or you could write your own Entries and submit them to Peer Review (having read the Writing Guidelines, of course).

"all other h2g2 volunteers are openly asked and not recruited"

The Sub Editors *and* the Community Artists (not sure about the others) were all handpicked when those schemes started. It's just a fact that when you start a new group and it's finding its feet then it's good to start off with a few carefully selected volunteers so that it doesn't get too big, and the Eds don't have to spend time recruiting, testing, etc when trying to launch and work out how things are going to work.

Can we all just stop, count to ten, take a couple of steps back and get a sense of proportion here?

This is h2g2 we're talking about, not the government, or a local authority, nor any organisation where people can abuse their power and have profound effects on the lives of other people. Boris Becker once put things into perspective when journalists were clamouring for his comments after a tennis match. He said something along the lines of 'It's just a game of tennis - nobody got killed'.

99% of the Volunteers here behave with due propriety 99% of the time - not a bad record I reckon - and some of those Volunteers get, understandably, brassed off when other Researchers start talking about unfairness and elitism and secrecy. Honestly, it sounds like sour grapes sometimes.

These people are most definitely volunteers. You can put your name down for any of the h2g2 Volunteer schemes, but unlike in real life where volunteering for something usually means you'll end up doing it, the Editors make the final decision as to whether an applicant gets the position or not, based on skill and suitability. There's no automatic acceptance just because someone says 'I want to be a Scout/ACE/Guru/Sub-ed/CA'. Judging by the tenor of this conversation it seems that some of the participants have forgotten that.

And if it turns out that you don't have the skill to do something, don't get pissed off about it - it's just one of things. I wish the hell I could play piano like Jools Holland - it would give me enormous pleasure and quite possibly make me rich, but it ain't gonna happen. I'll just have to live with it.

At first I thought it was my imagination, but now I don't think so. There does seem to be a lot more feedback on EG errors.

Either everyone thinks - Ha! Something for you lot to do or, which is what I suspect, it has reminded people that it is ok to post typos and mistakes to <./>feedback-editorial</.>. Particularly now, as the staff don't have to use up their valuable time fixing these things.

Either way it fixes errors in the EG, which has got to be a good thing.

leaves thread....... *kicks can* thinks about leaving hootoo *kicks can again*

Why?

Yes, please state what is 'the obvious' to you.

Mort - genuinely interested, not a

Paraphrasing Bah Humbug's posting:

"One percent of the volunteers misbehave one percent of the time".

Do tell!

Well, there was Felonious Monk's recent outburst in a PR thread which lead to him upping sticks and moving on, and wasn't there some sort of a furore a few months ago where a couple of ACEs got above their station in another thread somewhere? And then there was SEF mucking around with the dev server not long after she'd garnered herself a nice clutch of badges.

I, on the other hand, have always been a perfect

It wasn't my outburst that caused me to throw in the towel. It was the clear message I got that it's more important to be inclusive of all viewpoints than to be factually accurate, and with it the implication that people like me who actually put effort into making sure than our facts are watertight might as well not have bothered, because anybody can write any old New Age crap and get away with it now.

And before anybody else labels me as a pigheaded rationalist bigot, like it or not certain ideas *are* essentially scientific by nature because they are subject to falsification. Some assertions are simply wrong, and shouldn't be in a factual guide, especially not masquerading as established fact. I agree I was wrong and overly aggressive in the manner in which I addressed these issues but I *don't* apologise for making the points I did. I still think intellectual integrity has a fundamental role in editorial policy, unfashionable though it may be.

Hops in for a quick scan ... right!

I don't think anyone disagreed with the validity of the viewpoint, FM, just the ferocity with which it was asserted. We'd dearly love more help with the scientific side - as I mentioned at the time, it's not my strongpoint or area of interest by any means.

The only concern I had was by focusing on science, we don't want to balance to shift the other way and make people think they're worthless if they don't write scientific entries. But I did say that the best way to ensure factual scientific entries get into the Guide is to write them, or organise collaborative projects and I think this still stands.

Although we're a much smaller team than we once were, we're also a bit more flexible. If you want to come up with a proposal that's practical regarding our available resources, we'll look at how it can be achieved. That's one of the freedoms the h2g2 University offers, by the way. And personally, I'd love to see more entries coming out of the Science Explained forum.

Why can't the Curators fix errors in a "pending" entry?

Sorry, meant to leave a link for reference.

F47997?thread=1734255

Because pending entries haven't yet had the final once over by the italics before they're published.

And it's actually a quirk of the software, too - it's far easier, programming-wise, to give permission for a group of people to edit and amend Edited Entries than it is non-Edited (albeit pending) entries.

Perhaps we'll be able to tweak the system a little bit in the not-too-distant? It would, after all, be ideal to enable the Curators to give pending entries a once-over just prior to them going live... No promises though...

Paully

Or to be more specific, it's because Edited Entries have a different status to pending, recommended and normal entries, and the editing rights of the Curators extend only to entries given that status.

Outside Peer Review editing rights should only be exercised in association with the 'yikes' button and the related complaints proceedure.

So what would you say the EF forum is for?