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

C'mon xyroth. I never claimed to *know* these things and I don't think you thought I did. As I said was "As far as I understand it, ..."

And you asked for the reason why the entries where removed. I tried to answer that question best I could. Think it is a good idea to have a go at the ones who try to answer your questions?


As for " what was wrong with it, why it is not for discussion as to the things which need changing to bring it within thw edpol guidelines, what those guidelines are, and a whole host of other information we need to make informed comments in peer review so that all the work isn't passed to the subed who then has to pass it to the editors who then have to pass it to edpol."

a) you didn't ask that in the first question; b) as you expected I have no clearer idea then you have. Though I do remember that the Italics said the guidelines could be found at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/policies/producer_guides/

Tube

Frankly, I'm beginning to agree with Ben on this one.

It IS their sandbox. They can do what they want with it. They don't owe US any explanation at all.

Effectively, the issue now appears to have become a moderation one. So, as in line with previous moderation issues, the Italics will not discuss it on site.

BS, their own guidelines say they *are* supposed to give an explanation.

They explicitly said to FB before that it wasn't a moderation issue in the sense of breaking HouseRules etc. They may or may not have done a U-turn on the definitions but they are still shirking the explanations. FB says he hasn't received anything off-site either and he's a whole lot more believable than the italics right now. They have contradicted themselves in these threads and I have seen them behave in a despicable manner elsewhere.

Like I say, I guess I just don't care anymore.

"Effectively, the issue now appears to have become a moderation one. "

However it may appear, it is not a moderation issue. Moderation, in the context of this site, deals with complaints from customers about postings or entries which break the House Rules.

It has been explicitly stated that the original entry broke no such rules.

Also, the standard moderation email explicitly states "if you would like to rewrite your entry to remove the problem we would be happy for you to resumbit it". This is emphatically NOT the case with the original entry, in that despite nearly six WEEKS of repeated requests, there has been a point blank refusal to even discuss what the problem might be, let alone how to address it. Also, an attempt to do as the standard moderation email suggests has been met with an order to remove the resubmission from Peer Review.

This is therefore not a moderation issue. All of which is irrelevant to you, if you don't care. But if you don't care, attempting to close down discussion by misrepresenting this as "a moderation issue" is merely trolling those who do.

FB

BS, I raised the point of "Farming Today" as an example of how the editorial guidelines seem to be applied in a subjective and "patchy" manner across the BBC. (I'm also interested in how far the "watershed" stretches in the other direction; i.e. how late in the morning a programme has to run before it's considered to have moved from the largely "adult" overnight slot into "child-friendly" breakfast time.) The fact that this made it to broadcast should be kept in mind if our "Alfresco Sex" page gets pulled, as looks increasingly likely. So it was on-topic, sort of, maybe...

Peet

One of the points raised in the producer guidelines at http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/policies/producer_guides/ is the way in which material should be suitable for its intended audience.

"We offer a whole range of material and services on the Net which appeal to different sections of the public and are often targeted at specific groups. Our approach to taste and decency in this medium is based on the principle that we consider the expectations of the likely audience for the specific service. Web producers should be aware of what may offend the likely audience of any Web site .We should respect the views of that audience. This approach accords with our policy for BBC Radio, which approaches these matters with regard to the expectations of the channel’s likely audience." - BBC Online Editorial Guidelines, Editorial Standards, Taste and decency

It is likely that this philosophy had an impact on the broadcasting of Farming Today. It is also this philosophy which will have had an impact on the withdrawl of certain material from h2g2.

If the Eds believe that the audience for h2g2 has changed and now contains a significant proportion of youngsters, then the material published through h2g2 will need to be moderated to suit.

I was under the impression that the number of "children" using h2g2 was rather limited and hence it would be reasonable to publish material suitable for the "educated lay(wo)man", i.e. adults. The principle requirement then being for the BBC to avoid prosecution for deliberately causing offence, obscenity, libel, racial harassment etc.

Clearly this is no longer the case and the audience profile is such that the h2g2 EG must now meet publishing standards more applicable to http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/

I suspect that the difficulty here is, on the one hand we have gained a hard won freedom to publish with a reactive moderation policy. We self police our posts to threads and our writing in entries. We refer offensive or illegal material (don't we?). But on the other hand, an entry which was peer reviewed, cleaned up in the process, picked, subbed and entered into the EG, with the full support of the researchers (or in BBC parlance, the audience), has subsequently been removed without an apparent explanation.

An alternative course of action would have been for the Eds to to defend the entry and fight vigorously to ensure that it remained within the EG, on the grounds that EdPol haven't got a realistic idea of what h2g2 is and what sort of audience profile h2g2 might have. The Eds could also have fought on the grounds that the community had not rejected the Entry and therefore it was by definition suitable for the audience.

But there again, if the widespread use of the DNA engine leads to the creation of other communities like Collective but targetted at younger audiences, then inevitably the content of h2g2 becomes readily accessible to other communities.

I appreciate that I'm rambling a bit and that some of this ground may already have been covered (sic. Rule 2).

I guess there are many factors at play here:
- the many uses of the DNA engine
- the h2g2 audience profile
- complaints about entries
- differences in interpretation between editorial teams
- the basic premise of h2g2

What we could really do with is greater clarity.

Is h2g2 a quirky guide to life written, edited AND moderated by the researchers in accordance with a fairly clear set of guidelines or is it something else?

"Is h2g2 a quirky guide to life written, edited AND moderated by the researchers in accordance with a fairly clear set of guidelines or is it something else?"

It is something else, unfortunately, and after a long effort to make it exactly that, we have failed. I've said it once before but it bears repeating...

" I register my disappointment that the new tightened guidelines now render completely off limits any discussion - no matter how mildly phrased, informed, educational or tasteful they may be - of a large swathe of human experience that is demonstrably of great public interest. These guidelines diminish the site, and its usefulness. It undermines the touching claim to be an "unconventional guide to life, the universe and everything", fatally in my view.

With these revised guidelines in place, h2g2 is very much the "studiedly conventional guide to life [as experienced by small children with a sheltered upbringing], the universe [those parts of it that polite people can discuss at teatime in front of the vicar] and everything [that couldn't offend the more moronically reactionary readers of the Daily Mail]."

It's certainly an inspiring vision. I wish you all luck with it."

FB

... you have to wonder how long it will be before h2g2 is implementing the http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/ editorial policy ...

Dear Sirs or Madams,
I wish to complain about the link above to 'cbeebies'.
I found the site offensive with articles such as one called 'Getting Dressed'. As if this weren't an obvious contravention of good tastethere is another encouraging 'Competitions' between Tweenies.
If my tweenie is any longer than others, that is my business and it is dispicable to encourage these online tweenie comparisons.
Other than that, keep up the good work. I especially liked the C.S.Lewis radio lectures in 1942 and 'Pick of the Pops' in the late '60s.
I look forward to more arm's length stimulation.
peace
jwf

bookmarking...

but as I am, I notice this at the top of the posting page:

>>"This forum is not a public announcements forum. It is reserved for editors to post important news about h2g2, such as new versions of the site, or changes to official areas of h2g2.

Please don't ask questions or post messages here, as we anticipate lots of subscriptions to this page. If you have a query about any of the announcements here, please visit the relevant Feedback Forum - thanks!"

Did I recieve this in error, or did I just post here in error?

The message only applies to people attempting to create new threads in this forum, but there's no way to stop it from also being visible to all people who reply to a message posted in this forum.

RhoMuNuQ

Ah... Ok.

then.

I'd need to expand the GuideML for these messages so we can differentiate between new posts and replies. As it stands, we can't change the message depending on that.

There are already quite a few confusing ADDTHREADINTRO etc options. Last time I checked they weren't explained very well in the GuideML pages. If you were to add a new one it would only get worse. Unless of course you rationalised the whole thing at the same time by using attributes inside the tags but that sort of change could mess up existing pages.

tube, but you walked into it.

While I didn't really expect you to have the answers, I was reacting to a lot of comments in various threads which seemed to suggest that exactly the position I commented against wasn't really a problem.

added to that I was posting it after spending too many hours dealing with a 300 forum backlog caused by h2g2 suddenly and repeatedly becoming the bbc 404 error page, and you can see why the comment took the form it did.

As we happen to have jim posing to (and thus reading) this thread, perhaps he might point out to the other italics just how unhelpfull a lot of us are finding the persistant silence and refusal to comment when it comes to giving reliable feedback in various review forums.

Neither do we need some stupidly ineffective classification system like the grid, which could never have worked as intended.

All we really need is for the italics to figure out what they actually believe the current expected standards to be, and to use the currently existing (and more than adequet) methods to let us know what they are.

"As we happen to have jim posing" - oops, I would never dream of suggesting that this is something jim gets up to.

All I can say is... that in times past, silence was not an indicator of apathy - merely an inability to talk about current issues that the PTB at h2g2 were discussing with the Beeb. I hope that this is one of those times as well, and that it will work out to our favor. I just know that they're being VERY careful right now.

Ok so what I would like to know is this :-

"Is the idea of ANY entry which deals with people filming THEMSELVES during the procreative act totally prohibited on h2g2? Just in case that isn't clear what I am asking is Is it possible for FB's article to be written in such a way that it is acceptable?"

That question is for the editors, please answer this as would dearly like to know.

xyroth!