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

Not quite, Ancient Brit. Errors might be missed, or links become outdated and need replacing. Sharing the editing rights means we can maintain the Edited Guide better outside of normal UK working hours. The complaints button shouldn't be used to alert us to errors. As SEF points out, that's why we have the Editorial Feedback forum.

Jimster - Point taken my post relates to content editing and the suggestion from post 1 that < There may also be potential for further responsibilities > of curators.
Technical 'editing' is something else. Technical errors, more likely than not, have a specific solution.
I bow to 'experts' in both fields and hope they will work in conjunction with the originator.
There is a great deal to be learned from making mistakes. I must subscribe to the Editorial Feedback forum, there's quite a bit to h2g2 isn't there Cysaki. ( Quite a bit of snow in Hull at the moment. )
It has to be said that misunderstandings and errors in communication are as much a part of community life as are pristine and disinfected entries.

Although we might be able to extend the remit of the Curators in the future, it will always be an Edited Guide-focused group, so any extra functions we're able to give them will be to do with improving the service of the Edited Guide.

And if there's any confusion, it could easily be because we're writing all this from the point of view of insiders. It's really useful to get feedback on areas where we simply haven't explained ourselves properly - and you're always really polite so it's great to hear from you

To be honest, it's probably not worth us getting powers over 'pending' entries, unless it's a really simple operation to do that. We're checking Front Page entries as soon as possible after they go live anyway (unless Gnomon gets there first ), and if there was a requirement that a Curator checks entries before they go live, it would introduce a time pressure we could probably do without.

To answer your question, Cyzaki, EF is still the place to point out errors and additions and suggest changes. We can act on and adjust minor points, and it's good to see that most EF posts are being dealt with in under an hour now! I see my Curating role as (in no particular order):

1. Finding errors for myself and correcting them.
2. Adding links to older entries and updating broken external links.
3. Responding to changes suggested by the community through EF.

The third hasn't changed since the Italics did it all, except now they have more time to do other things. Like *humorous ham(p)ster joke removed in name of decency*

Jimster - Glad your 'Tweeking' will be restricted to the Edited Guide, I felt sure it wouldn't go beyond that.
Skankyrich if you are to act as a curator then you should give the same attention when making a post that you would give to an edited guide entry. I would suggest that Cyzaki's question (post 160) was his way of pointing out my lack of understanding in that area and not a lack of understanding on his part. You see I exist within h2g2 without any great interest in the Edited Guide.
An 'outsider' eh Jimster.
Happy New Year - Ancient Brit.

I'm aware of that, Brit; Cyzaki is a Scout and Sub, and doesn't need any of the roles of the forums explaining. I just presumed someone did, but couldn't work out who

I hope you understand a little better now

... and Cyzaki is a girl as well

I stand ' curated ' .

*stumbles in late to the party'

What a great idea! Good to see dedication exploited, er, rewarded in this way. My first thought was that this makes the EG *more* democratic, not less democratic. Ok, so the rest of us can't say "Me! Me! Me! Pick Me!" but it is telling that none of the group are that bothered by badges, isn't it? I like the idea tha tthe ultimate badge is no-badge.

Like I said, a good move, which democratises the guide.

Ben
PS - Gnomon, you are a very very scary man you know. Lovely, wise, knowledgable, intelligent and scareeeeeeeey.

It's no secret that the directive from above to us and every other BBC employee right now is 'work smarter, not harder' and to be honest I'm kicking myself that I didn't think of this sooner. The whole point of volunteers, right from the start of the ACEs, is to make the most of the fact that there are more community members than staff members, and this is one area where more hands to the pumps is definitely a good idea. It means that by 'working smarter', we're free to work harder in other areas.

Wikipedia has become a bit of a target recently - a number of news sites have jumped on the problems the site has been experiencing recently, which I think is a shame because it's a wonderful idealistic project. The problem is that its idealism leaves it open to abuse, which has always been its biggest negative. But their problems have helped us too. h2g2 is similarly open to abuse but projects like the Curators mean we can hopefully tackle the problems head on, be swiftly reacive to any issues and make the central Edited Guide a more reliable resource - which I'd hope would have a positive knock-on effect for all our other activities too. It also means it's much easier now to react to feedback about typos, inaccuracies and mistakes, which will hopefully mean people will feel less inclined to get angry when they encounter such things and will feel like they're being helpful showing us where we might have gone wrong. All good, really.

Because of a lot of external factors - and probably because we were still a little stunned by the previous round of restructuring that led to the in-house team being cut in size - we weren't able to do much about movng h2g2 forward in the last few years. But starting with the development of the mobile service I'm really pleased with how much we've achieved in the last year - both as a small paid team and as a community as a whole. It's my own personal goal to work through even more of the backlog of feature requests and work out which ones *can* be done. Even if it means we can't do two or three major pushes, it'd be good to be able to tick off five or six smaller ones this year - not counting smileys, which we've already got lined up. We're only waiting on a couple of graphics to be sent in before we upload a set of new ones.

We've got a meeting with all the other DNA sites in a few weeks and we're hoping it might lead to a bit of trading too, because we know some of the other sites have got features we'd like, and visa versa. So hopefully, we won't have to pay for it all either

I'm really glad this has received such a favourable response though - and that the people who are, effectively, our test subjects for the scheme have been so eager and enthusiastic to make some quite selfless suggestions for the good of the site.

Traveller in Time as self proclaimed migration officer
"Do also try to get a sensible migration policy between the sites.
We are not able to explain why there are differences between the accounts, just that there are. "

To be fair, that's not really down to us to explain. We do try to where possible though. Additionally, it's not always advisable to be able to make it easy - there are people on the Messageboards who choose to come to h2g2 only to bypass the House Rules of their own sites, while having zero interest in being a proper part of the h2g2 community.

I know this has been raised before but it would be helpful if h2g2 wasn't 'promoted' with The Collective, POV, Radio 2 chat rooms (POV & R2 get *seriously* heated from what I've seen) etc. There's no mention of what the guide is until you've got to the front page, which has links to explanations but no explanations of its own. This is probably why people join the site and proceed to post in the 'Announcements' page!

Surely it must be *someone's* remit to explain, even if it's nothing more than having to go through a 'This is not a chatroom' page before getting to the front page. But nicely worded of course...

Ooh, new smileys

You mean to say you're actually reading this?

Me? Yes, I am, I'm very interested. Why do you ask?

Personally I think I got lost. Does any one know the way to the London Meet page?

I wonder if there is a 'nothingk, nothingk'-smiley amongst the new ones. Forget about it, I wasn't implying anything. I just wondered where you got the idea from that there are new smiley's. So I checked and no ... no new smiley's. Then I came back and started reading.

Jimster said:
"Even if it means we can't do two or three major pushes, it'd be good to be able to tick off five or six smaller ones this year - not counting smileys, which we've already got lined up. We're only waiting on a couple of graphics to be sent in before we upload a set of new ones" post 170

Roymondo: A6169322