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

Leaping in here to defend the SBVM, sort of.

As I see it, (and there are perfectly good reasons why people in all directions will be shouting "you're biased!"), there are several things which should not be forgotten:

1. LeKZ was not banned for a single incident.
2. That event was discussed ad nauseam *here*.
3. Those remaining *here* relatively rapidly accepted that the verdict would not change, and moved on to more productive pursuits. This has, I like to think, resulted in a great deal of careful thought being applied to the question of "how do we make h2g2 a fairer, more professional place?". Examples of the schemes would be the Magna Carta, the Arbiter scheme and the very policy being implemented now. LeKZ's banning WAS NOT a wholly negative event for this community, even in the view of her friends, who saw something worth improving in the community which banned her (otherwise why try to improve it?).
4. Personally - ("I'm biased!") - I think that once LeKZ *noticed* that we were now thinking and talking about the site, and policies, and principles, and generalities, and not about *her* case any more, her return was inevitable. I stress, a mere opinion and mine own.

This is aimed at jwf, in particular: "friends" of LeKZ, and I used to count myself among those, did not in my opinion go about "sytematically been trying to destroy the good will of this site for the past six months". Rather, I think we were trying to improve the professionalism of the running of it and the transparency and fairness of the previously arbitrary and frankly Kafkaesque disciplinary procedures. In fact, during that time, the discussion was remarkably concentrated in the LS thread and a few others, although it did leak out from time to time. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of active researchers even know LeKZ exists, or that this policy exists or is being implemented. Look how many people are posting in the four threads here - not many.

Anyway, I'm very verbose, and I'm trying to give up.

H.

Hoovooloo, I've been to a couple of community meet ups. Believe me, *everybody* knows who LeKZ is. At least I never met anyone who didn't.

If you say so Orcus. If you know that "everyone" knows, I assume you know how many active researchers there are (my definition of "active" - has made a post here, however short, in the last two months, say). So, how many is it? Also, how many researchers go to meets? I can believe that everyone *you* know knows, and I suppose that given that you're an ACE, that includes a lot of people. But do you go around telling people about it? I don't. I don't honestly know if everyone I know here knows, because I don't talk about it to the majority of the people I talk to. Just to pick on someone completely undeservedly, "Awix" and I are discussing Dr. Who. at the moment. I doubt he's heard of LeKZ, and he won't hear of her from me.

Please understand, I'm not disputing what you say here, I'm honestly interested. If you, as an ACE, tell me that, well, OK. But I'm assuming you've got some basis for it and I'm sincerely interested in that. When was the last meet in England, and when is the next, and where would I find out? And how many active researchers are there, really? (my definition, not the figure on the /info page - I mean, Willem/Pillowcase is at least *three* of them, as is LeKZ, now).

I suppose I ought to chuck in at this point a query about how representative a meet could be... FoLKZ alone (and there aren't *that* many of them) contains people living in Chicago, Denver, Kenya, South Africa, Texas (I *think*) and others. I seriously doubt the chances of them ever meeting each other all at once, much less you.

*Not* being confrontational - seriously interested in how widely knowledge of this stuff has spread into the community, given how few people seem to be bothered to actually contribute.

H.

Well, when I went to the meetup there were a couple of comments (AGB and Mina? maybe...) on lurkers - which is kind of vaguelly related, but other than that LeKZ never came up, at least amongst anyone I was talking to.

The volunteers all know, to be sure (it was list-announced, after all). And anyone subscribed to the community soapbox or related areas would know. Other than that...

Ok, *everyone* is probably an exaggeration but I'm certain that it is certainly more than 5% - at least it was in September (I think that's when the spring onion was). The conversation came up and everybody knew all about it and most were not volunteers and most comments were along the lines of 'I haven't commented and I don't want to get involved'.
I am not trying to imply anything other than the fact that this ongoing situation is very well known by a large number of active researchers on h2g2. I daresay most will have moved on, I certainly have had nothing to do with it for months. My attention has only been drawn again in the last couple of days.
You used a good phrase in another thread recently - 'ad nauseum'.
Really, is there nothing more important than still being on this one, six months later?

I think there was about 100 researchers there last time, the summer one in London.
Active researchers is a tricky one. No way are there as many people on h2g2 as there are accounts, as Hoovooloo stated, and I've always been curious how many actual researchers there are. I still do come into contact with people that I have never seen before, both online and at meet ups. They only have to see my page, and the threads on there, and they will soon find out about her. Gossip always spreads when something is going on. I don't make a point of telling people that don't know as a volunteer, I get new people (or new accounts) posting to my page quite frequently, they only have to look through my conversations to find it.

Apologies for the appalling grammar in that last post

> "is there nothing more important than still being on this one, six months later?"

More important things are signified, of course, by the conversation at the top of Orcus' page: "How long is a piece of string?"...

In all seriousness, people are allowed to spend their time on whatever they like, and I'm not sure that it's your place to tell them what to spend it on. If you think it's a waste of your time - don't post here. I'm not interested in classical music, but I don't wander outside concerts telling people they shouldn't be interested either...

Maybe I should!

Well, surely being sat on by Greebo T. Cat is a very important situation to be dealt with at all costs?

'and I'm not sure that it's your place to tell them what to spend it on'

Well, please inform me exactly where in my post I told people what to do or where to post. Surely that was merely a question expressing my own opinion. That's something I've never noticed you being shy of doing

Orcus: I used to find it interesting. Which is of course my choice. And no, you didn't suggest I shouldn't have posted here. I think the inference taken was that you thought we'd been doing nothing else but bang on about this since LeKZ was banned the first time.

On the other hand, in the six month period you refer to, I've had the following entries go into the Edited Guide:

A654987 Lyocell (29 Minutes Ago)
A649749 The Ultimate Martial Art? (Last Week)
A652268 How to Survive a Skilift Ride on a Snowboard (Last Week)
A650666 Home Cinema Sound Standards (2 Weeks Ago)
A650675 Multiple Remote Controls (2 Weeks Ago)
A622531 Gyroscopes (Oct 2, 2001)
A600436 The Bussard Ramjet - an Interstellar Drive? (Sep 18, 2001)
A597152 Centrifugal Force (Sep 12, 2001)
A593282 Science Fiction - Some Hard, Some Soft (Aug 30, 2001)
A593048 Jets and Rockets (Aug 23, 2001)
A593273 Coriolis Force - a Convenient Fiction (Aug 16, 2001)
A593174 Jet Engines (Aug 14, 2001)
A592742 Contact Juggling (Aug 7, 2001)

In addition to that, I've got four more entries pending/recommended on:
Unicycles and how to ride one
How to make a compression lift paper plane
Windsurfing
Conkers

Plus a couple more still languishing in Peer Review, and two included in a University project on NBC warfare.

There is also the small matter of having pretty much singlehandedly drafted, refined and presented a new policy for the operation of the site which the Editors accepted and are now implementing.

So I wouldn't say I've been completely focussed on this or anything, would you?

(and to people who are wondering, yes, I do have a life, and a full time job with a large multinational company you've all heard of)

H.

Hoovooloo, that post must have been fairly hard work. A shame as I wasn't particularly addressing that point at you personally, I'm well aware of your hard work for the guide (I'm a scout too remember). Sorry if that implication came across, it was meant more as a general *oh no not this old topic again* type of comment, it was the 5% figure you quoted that I really wanted to comment on.

As Lucinda rightly pointed out, if it doesn't interest me, why am I posting here...

> "Well, please inform me exactly where in my post I told people what to do or where to post"

Ad Nauseam == towards vomit. Vomiting is typically a bad thing. Hence, posting on this thread is a bad thing, and hence one shouldn't do it. Well, that's how I interpreted the post, anyway...

> "Vomiting is typically a bad thing."

Oh, I dunno.... sometimes, it really helps. If it's either vomit or somehow try to metabolize everything you just ingested

GTB - workin' on the drift, all the live-long day...

yep - bitter experience shows that washing up liquid is hard to metabolise...

For Orcus's departing back - that post might *look* like hard work. Can you do "copy" and "paste" on your machine? That's where those dates and entry numbers came from. Click on "See More Edited Entries", click-drag, copy, paste it in, takes about a minute. Hence the rather specific timing of the Lyocell entry. Just trying to prove I have a life and don't spend hours on meaningless trivia. Er...

Seriously, since Orcus didn't bother to reply to the direct questions I posed before buggering off, can any other ACEs, or for that matter anyone at all answer these fairly simple queries? I'm honestly interested. Failing an answer here, can anyone suggest where I might post these questions and expect an answer?

When was the last meet in England (The Spring Onion?), and when is the next, and where would I find out? And how many active researchers are there, really?

H.

meets and such are on the 'Talk' page - down the bottom somewhere. They have a list of past and future...

Next meetup: London, 26 Jan. 2002 http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F78288?thread=146369

If you look at the who's online window, there's normally about 60 researchers online, pretty much most of the time.
Out of 91000 people, that's pretty poor.
Someone better than me with statistics might be able to make something like a guess at the amount of active researchers? (although 10% of those 60 are often italics)

The next meet in England is on Saturday in Glasgow, but I've never seen a meet that comes anywhere near the amount of researchers that go to the Italic arranged ones in London, although most of the Scottish ones are very popular.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A435791

btw, I took 'England' to mean 'UK', my apologies if I offended anyone.

Mina: I'm your statistician, but I don't know how long the average researcher spends online per day, or whether the average researcher logs on every day. Guesses? I can't even guess, because I'll do 8 hours at a stretch. The cyber-cafe hired me, I'm here so much. I don't care whether any of you think I have a life.



Hoovooloo: Remember some weeks ago, in the LS thread, when there was some trouble with that Edited Entry stats page that Mark wrote? When that was going on, I posted a message saying that it would be neat to have more statistics here. One of the ones I suggested was "how many distinct researchers log on, in a given day". What would also be neat is "how many researchers are currently 'in the building'". The code would be cake to write, but I'm sure it's not at the top of Jim's list. Mark agreed that it would be neat to know that, and he didn't give any indication that he knew it, even a ballpark figure.