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

In reply to Mark Moxon's original question, I guess I have to reiterate that people can exercise all the courtesy and friendliness in the world, and there are no guarantees. In this thread, people were being courteous, friendly, constructive, only mildly critical, perphrastic, downright obscure, all to avoid saying anything excessively discouraging outright. It might have been better if, early on, someone had simply said '"Intelligence", have you cracked, mate? You can't write that; you'll never live long enough!'

As soon as we start with 'it might have been better...', or 'supposing someone had...', we're on a slippery slide to terminal insecurity, and the inability to speak plainly to anyone from now on.

It seems to me, particularly in light of the fact that PlayboyReporter had been here for over a year, that we should not assume we know (let alone are) all of his reasons for having started behaving unreasonably in the last couple of weeks, and for having made some totally inexplicable statements in the last couple of days, and for his finally having chosen to throw a fit, fall in it, and pull it in after him. We do not and cannot know what else may or may not have been going on in his life. If he did not choose to tell anyone, we just have to assume he thought it was not anyone's business, here. All we have to go by is the explicit evidence in the actual thread of conversation, and his earlier articles. That is not a lot of information upon which to base any suppositions.

We can use this event as an opportunity to learn what we can and cannot do as a community. We can encourage one another. We can listen to one another. We can support one another. We can ask questions, rather than making statements based upon assumptions. We can tread carefully rather than trampling everything flat. We can do all of those things, as people did in this thread, with PlayboyReporter, and have the scenery explode messily and unexpectedly in our face any way. So, we cannot assume we know what is really going on. We cannot assume that anything we say is not potentially offensive. We cannot assume anything we say is even comprehensible, let alone understood to mean what we thought we said. We cannot assume that friendliness, courtesy, care, concern, and kindness will always elicit the same things in return.

Most of the time, they will. Most people, most of the time, make a certain amount of sense. The best we can do is our best. We can not do unto others what we would prefer not to have done to ourselves. We can try to keep things even, light, and relaxed. If we become too sure that everything is just great, it probably means there is some dysfunction just under the surface of the community, about ready to blow, because that is the nature of group dynamics. We have to remember that h2g2 is a group of individual people, who have a handful of things in common, at most. Group dynamics tend to amplify whatever is going on in any group, especially if it is a tone, or mood. It is important, especially for anyone with a 'job-description' at h2g2, to keep a fundamentally positive attitude. Negativity is the only thing that travels faster than gossip, which is the only thing on Earth known to travel faster than light.

'Positive' does not meen sicky-sweet, of course. This is h2g2, not Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood. Positive does not mean 'to the point of playing deaf, dumb, and blind to problems'. It means detecting potential problems before they start to get out of hand. This means a lot of people have to spend more time trying to get to know more people, so *if* someone starts behaving in an uncharacteristic way, that person's friends will know at once. This means people need to be more friendly, and more persistent about their friendliness. Some users will undoubtedly find that intrusive and irritating. They can have Unfriendly Curmudgeons' Clubs, where they can go, and ignore one another in peace. This community is not so big that everyone cannot know everyone here. One day, I hope it will be. Right now, it is small enough that people can, and probably should all know one another by name and at least one description (eg Arpeggio - wordy).

The reality of online communities is that they attract a fair number of socially impaired people, who manage much better with 'friends' and 'colleagues' who go away at the click of a mouse. It is unrealistic to expect any online community to behave like a Real World physical community. There are connexions that are stronger, online, because everyone is there by *choice*, and connexions that are weaker, because we really do not know one another, to speak of. When tempers or moods or attitudes happen online, they tend to affect a small number of people a great deal, and the majority of the community may not know anything ever happened. In this case, those of us who were posting/reading this thread are the people upon whom this has had the most impact. That is maybe eight people, or ten, out of the whole h2g2 community. It is up to us whether or not the events on this thread have a community-wide impact.

My experience with events like this has been that if people dwell upon it too heavily, or expend too much effort second-guessing themselves and each other, it ends up affecting the community as a whole, much more than if people digest what happened, and understand that every so often, conflict happens, and move on. The whole of h2g2, tiptoeing around in a conflict-avoidant near panic, is a real danger.

Part of the reason I posted what I am sure sounded very cold to some of you, about remembering that we cannot *make* anyone do anything, is that I have been a member of online communities about this size, for a year and more at a stretch. I have seen what *can* happen if people start trying *too* hard. It does not feel natural, and after a while, newcomers are alarmed by the 'friendly' rictus with which they are met. People have to just act naturally, or the mental construct of a fun community comes apart. We all need to feel able to speak candidly to one another, or we end up defeating the purpose of the organisation. We need to be free to critique each other's work, without asking ourselves 'is this question all right?', or 'am I being too picky?'. Otherwise we shall all turn into nervous wrecks.

At the same time, we can all make an effort to get to know each other better. We can try to remember that, most of the time, people treat others as they wish others would treat them. We can take the Guide, and h2g2 seriously, but we probably should not take ourselves too seriously. (I'm listening to my own advice; most of the time, I don't take me very seriously. This time, I did.) If it stops being fun, we need to stop doing it. In that respect, PlayboyReporter may have done just what he, personally, needed.

Group dynamics are not terribly tricky. The most important aspect of group dynamics is that no individual person, event, or issue get ahead of the goals of the group as a whole. To that end, I think this has been a learning experience, and it is one on which I have no more words.

Leaving it right here, as over so far as I am concerned,

Kassandra York, Psych Dept ('Arpeggio')
Leïlah el Khalil Zendavesta, MAR

Lucinda,

Thank you.

Arpeggio

I suppose I'll just hang around here to see if the light really does stay on when the door closes.

(Responding to to Arpeggio's solicitation for sequiturs of non)

Barton

Deja vu all over again...

This has happened before, and will happen again. Usually the author has bitten off more than they could chew. Thwophlag Gargleblat and his 'God' entry comes to mind. While obviously an intelligent and articulate individual, he chose to write about God from an atheistic, yet Christian point of view. After several bouts of criticism (although nothing as scorching as Playboy received) Thwophlag withdrew his entry rather than alter it substantially.

I've always believed that h2g2 has an advantage as an encyclopedic resource because of the large base of information it draws from - on this topic alone we have at least two experts, and several well-informed individuals criticizing the article. An entry that braves that gauntlet and survives will have covered the topic adequately.

Having said that - it's our responsibility in Peer Review to be encouraging as well as critical. A few simple words - this is good, could be better - go a long way.

Just a quick note to say the discussion here is a good example of what makes h2g2 tick - people are looking at how it works, and developing ideas to make it work better. Thanks to everyone for their considered input; don't stop.

One thought: although it's not impolite, is it perhaps unwise to post *really huge* comments to Peer Review? Looking at it from Playboy Reporter's angle, he wrote a pretty good piece (IMHO), and then got so many comments, some of which were amazingly long, that he just thought 'oh hell, what's the point?' So how do we balance the need for comments to be made, and the scary factor that huge comments on entries in a public forum may well intimidate, and possibly offend some people.

The Writing Workshop is, of course, one solution, but does anyone have any comments about the length of people's comments in PR?

I'll pop back in on Tuesday - we're all out of the office on Monday.

A Field Trip?

Something like that!

First things first, quick h2g2 history lesson - Peer Review came into being (if memory serves) mid 2000, the first Entries getting to The Front Page from Peer Review probably came Nov 2000, before that Entries were just submitted and a SubEd decided yay or nay, and tidied it up, anyone could submit anything - so this was probably PlayboyReporters first time in Peer Review (I do not recall seeing him around for a whiley). In any case what happened here was scary.

PlayboyReporter has just been run out of town, after what probably felt like to him (it certainly would to me) his Entry was ripped apart write in front of the whole class (no maybe the whole school, and it was videotaped so that anyone who wants to can watch it over and over again). He was insulted and, amongst others, basically told that he was boorish, lazy and didn't APPEAR to have learning difficulties (with 'but you never know...' hovering right after it).

I have just spent yesterday this morning going through this thread, and as far as I can tell there are some fallacies going around. So here we go, as far as I remember, any one can put their Entry to Peer Review when THEY decide it is ready. The Guide is not an academic journal, thank The Lord, it would be too dull to read then. Every Entry does not have to be the be all and end all on a subject. The Guide can be updated (and it is happening as we speak) and so Entries can be changed.

To me (A hard science degree with a couple of years of Psychology at university) the Entry seemed fine, OK so it didn't say what intelligence was, hardly suprising, people who think about it for a living aren't sure, the genii here are not sure. It didn't quote what every crackpot has said about intelligence in the last century, which would be offputting and dull. It did bring some of the points, like that intelligence is more or less undefined, like IQ tests don't really have so much reference to the real world and some of the problems with them. It didn't do more than brush over the stats behind psychology, well thank God, because that would have just turned me to stone. What more do you want a fourteen year-old, non-genius boy with dyslexia (and PlayboyReporter could be one) to do? Explain what it is like to be a genius to us? When Arpeggio, who is one, cannot? So it isn't perfect, woopee, I would have recommended this piece to go forward.

The critics here, when their critisism is taken piece by piece, are mostly polite, with good points and ideas, but taken all together it is like a huge sledgehammer crashing towards you with the words 'YOU ARE STUPID' embossed on it. Now for h2g2 survive we want to keep our writers, they are fairly few and far between, this means a bit of nurture. As a SubEd I do not mind bad spelling, or grammer too much, GuideML is no problem at all. If the idea is there I will gladly run with it, I will try and check the details, maybe even put some in if I have time, and find any. This is what this SubEd does. If it ever came to just going over perfect pieces of prose, everything sorted by Peer Review, I would quit SubEding. So if an Entry is not perfect, or missing something, just send it to me, I will do what I can with it and eventually something will appear on The Front Page vagually connected with it. If it is not good enough then write one yourself that is good enough.

In fact I look forward to seeing Arpeggio and Bartons Entry, on Intelligence, on the Front Page or a uni project (they seem to be the only peeps here qualified to talk about intelligence). As they say Sh*t or get of the pot. Hmmmm, my ranting £0.02 over, and what did we learn? The Guide dies without writers, please lets try to keep them in future. Until later.....
BCNU - Crescent

One more thing I'd like to say as a general comment.

This has been one person leaving. Sadly, hundreds of people have left h2g2 after having *not enough* criticism. I've just been to the last page of PR threads. There are 13 threads there. Two of them are mine. Two of them belong to h2g2 researchers that are still active. The other nine belong to people who are AWOL, or semi-AWOL. In the next page of 25, eight of them belong to researchers who are still active. The other 17 belong to people who are AWOL or semi-AWOL. Based on my rough estimate, of course.

That's the background against which we're having this long and detailed post mortem. The writers as a collective don't have enough feedback. This is one single case where a researcher has been apparently intimidated by the sheer quantity of feedback. One. Perspective is a good thing.
--

Mark reckoned Playboy thought 'oh hell, what's the point?' in response to the quantity of feedback. Perhaps he did - but in that case he could have dropped the entry without leaving h2g2, and it would have been shunted off to the workshop with barely a second thought. This too happens often enough - and we should expect it. It would be an amazing thing indeed if no researcher ever bit off more than they could chew.

It varies from person to person. I've been criticised by writers before now for being over-SHORT in my comments. "You might consider X" - "Where? How? Why? That's not helpful!" - "Sorry, ...". Every writer on h2g2 is different, and the subject picked makes a great difference too. Gross generalisations are not helpful, even when written by a Bold Italic.

Anywho, learning points. The first learning point for me is that, in future, if I see an author who doesn't appear to be responding to comments, or is responding in an offensive way, I'm just going to ignore hir. Eventually they'll probably become disenchanted with the whole process and leave, but since my name won't be in the thread, I can try and pretend it isn't my fault. Better to never try than to try and fail, after all. Better to have a writer die of starvation than be shot in the foot. Better to not bother defusing a situation with humour than risk talking to someone who's missing a funny bone.

The second learning point is somewhat more positive. In future, I'm going to take my larger comments "out of line" and post them to the forums of the entry. That should be less intimidating, and more easily ignored if the author happens to be an ungrateful SOB. It should also make the PR thread flow a little more smoothly, without such large 'interruptions'. Then I can just post a quick post to the PR thread which is something like: "I've posted the details in a conversation attached to the entry, but basically I think you should seriously consider using vowels, as they really do improve the readability of an entry."

MyRedDice - *picks up Playboy's teddy from the corner, and wonders if it'll fetch a good price in hell*

> "didn't APPEAR to have learning difficulties (with 'but you never know...' hovering right after it)"

*sheesh*

Learning point three: if you can't criticise someone for what they said, criticise someone for what they may possibly have implied, if you squint your eyes and hold your head on one side.

Learning point four: the correct number of winkeye smileys to use in a post is one less than the number that will crash the servers. Any less will cause some idiot out there to think that you might be serious.

I'm seriously considering getting offended here. I'll settle for going somewhere which is more productive. I'm done here.

I know Lucida (even though you won't read this ), but I was irritated and that is what it seemed to say. *shrug* However, one thing I did not put in my rant (of which you only picked that point, why?) is that this forum has me seriously considering not putting any of my Entries through Peer Review. It would not be worth the hassle, between Scouts who demand perfection and people who may know every small detail of the subject, and want it in, why bother? It seems it would take me too long, with too much work, to get it worthy of the Front Page. However, we will see Until later....
BCNU - Crescent

Hmmm...

I've just read this whole thread and agree with what Crescent just had to say. I occasionally write articles, often about topics in which I am no expert. I can imagine the 'to hell with it' affect that reams of criticism may induce. Strange as it may seem, not all of use enjoy spell-checking, dealing with Guide ML and lengthy smart-arse crits. I'm unsurprised he gave up, although I also feel that the tone of the previous thread was mostly friendly.

Perhaps articles like this need some kind of a controversy corner, with a moderator in a blue peace-keeping beret on hand to make sure that everyone plays nice. Then the resulting article could be written by committee, or where there are two (or more) irreconciable schools of thought on the matter there could be two linked articles with a common introduction, and a forum to vote for which becomes the guides default entry...

If we can't write half-baked articles for fun (and h2g2) about subjects in which we ain't 'expert' then we may as well take away our towels and write for an encyclopedia. Maybe quoting Douglas is considered a bit naff here - I don't care - the Guide, to me should "contain much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly innacurate."

well, thats my POV. Thanks for your kind attention.

purplejenny

First of all, my thanks to the kind and considerate italics for taking the time to look at my acidentally multiple post (#83-87) on the previous page and to having it restored.

(Side note: Moderators might consider alerting Researchers (vial email) as to the reasons behind such an event even if it is restored. I don't believe that most of us intend to run into the borderline decision area but with a little more insight into the decision making process we could try to avoid putting all of us through these situations in the future. For now I will assume that there was a difference in perceived values. That's pretty much all I can do under these conditions. Thanks for being there and doing your jobs the best way you know how.)

Crecent and all of you,

Thank you for the historical perspective, it informs the comment that wondered how Playboy Reporter could have been so ignorant of the PR process and what happens after. It also explains Playboy Reporter's dismay at having to stand behind what he wrote. Even more it explains why he thought that all he had to do was come up with an idea and the staff would fix it up and make it right.

It explains it, it doesn't justify it.

It also explains how having been away from the process for some significant period of time that he didn't understand that the values have changed. At least, to me, it seems the values have changed. Standards, expressed in the comments of the scouts and other 'official' volunteer staff (and researchers who admitedly are more in the position of meeting those standards than setting them but who are simply being enthusiastic in promulgating percieved values) are higher now than they were then. I believe Peta mentioned that there are more than 50,000 of us out here crying for her attention. The standards don't need to be low to encourage contributions. When there are approximately 220 articles in the queue waiting to be accepted its pretty darn clear that PR is intended to serve the purpose of raising the bar another notch.

To be honest, I can't believe that there was any other reason for starting the Peer Review system if there wasn't some intent to vest a certain amount of responsibility in the Scouts for choosing which peg to set the bar on. The Researchers who are interested in writing for the guide Who knows how many? Who can know? I would be willing to bet very large amounts of my time that that number is vastly lower than 50,0000. Most likely less than 10,000 and still quite likely in my estimation less than 1,000 who ever submit an article to PR whithin any given current time slice of the registered researchers -- so, yes, we most definitely do need to keep our writers. -- NOTE: I did say we, more further down seem to like that challenge and embrace it. It means that there is some issue of quality, that the standards expressed in help pages about how to write for the guide have real content and intent. It means that articles accepted for the guide are not just what the writer thinks is pertinent but what hir peers feel is pertinent and what the scouts, who quite obviously answer to the higher level staff, think is pertinent.

Now whatever the situation was in the past, this is the present and, unless someone reading this thinks that h2g2 should drop the Peer Review system and TRULY end all possibility of peers expressing an opinion about the quality of work being offered for consideration or if they feel that in the interest of equality and fairness that anything anyone writes, subject to posted rules and regulations, spelling and gramatical considerations should be accepted and made part of the guide -- which is *not* an unreasonable view in light of the quote from Douglas Adams above, the situation now is that your value system has been taken over by the Peers who choose to Review.

This *should* alarm the italics, it certainly alarms some of us researchers who are concerned that either the standards expressed through the choices being made and demonstrated when an article is picked are inconsistent and contradictory. Please note: I am making observations here, not making charges.

It's confusing enough when those peers who have no real knowledge of the subject of an article come through and say that everything looks fine then someone who does have knowledge comes through and says that significant information is missing, and then someone comes throgh and says that the grammar is the issue most important to clear up. Then a scout comes through and selects the article without being allowed to say why the comments that haven't been complied with aren't signficant.

My first submission was largely recieved with either a "I liked it but I need to think about it" comment or a "I follow what your saying and you don't seem to be saying it in a fashion that works." manner. There was no massive jumping on from the community but what comments I got indicated people like the way I wrote but weren't sure what I was writing about." To me, that's a pretty heavy blow, but from the vaguness of what was being said, it took me about two weeks to figure out that the article didn't work for the edited guide. So, I posted a note saying that I was withdrawing t from consideration and that thread is still out there clogging up the queue.

I, next, submitted simple annotated dictionary type entry that everyone seemed to like and within a reasonable amount of time it was accepted and it's still out there waiting to be edited and probably will wait till the h2g2 program change that I mentioned in the article actually goes live. That's fine. I understand that.

I rewrote the original article in an entirely different way -- more straight forward, comprehensive, and traditional. I got virtually no comments from the community and then, suddenly, it was accepted. It has been edited and is now pending. Fine. Good. But, no comments means no insight. My suspicion is that no one had any ideas of how to add to or improve the article so they said nothing. We all have time restraints so we tend to go where we feel we can be of some help or where we have strong objections.

(I'm telling you all of this for the purpose of establishing reasons for saying things that would sound arbitrary otherwise. Please bear with me.)

When the article on Intelligence first appeared, I read it and found out that the author seemed to believe the statement that 'intellegence is what intelligence tests measure.' My first reaction was essentially the same as that of those who understood the issue better and who posted later trying to inform the author of the lack of depth and completeness in the article. My second reaction, when I read what Playboy Reporter wrote to introduce his article was that he had found some interesting web sites that gave 'IQ' tests and writing an article was, to him, a way of posting a note on the community bulletin board about something neat. Well and good, but not my cup of tea. I passed it up. I didn't think it belonged in the guide but that wasn't my decision to make and I didn't see the point in trying to talk Playboy Reporter into writing an article he wasn't interested in writing and clearly wasn't qualified to write.

Time passes and some one says, in effect, you won't believe what this person has written (I don't need to attribute it, its on h2g2 which is all open to viewing.) When I read the whole thread, I discover that someone has thrown down the guantlet and Playboy Reporter has picked it up and is trying to synthesize an article from what he is being told of and that researchers are responding to his willingness to try, despite his having been warned, several times, that the subject is too wide to be dealt with short of a massive University project. He is clearaly going into information overload because all he really wanted to do was have an excuse to encourage people to take an online 'IQ' test and post their scores. Something that happens on any number of typical small community BBS all over the web but which is not what h2g2's edited guide is all about.

Furthermore, he obviously is not ready to accept that h2g2 is not another BBS with a 'cute' thematic tie-in to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Instead, he is being 'assaulted' to write an 'article' on a vague area of study with contradictory and ad hoc defitions which *can* be surveyed and commented on, I suppose, but as has been mentioned above by Lentilla would be equivalent to trying to write a brief and definitive essay on God.

(If you remember a while back, there was a survey on God on the front page. I have no idea if it will every go anywhere but I hope itallic folks will have the good sense to leave it alone. As I mentioned in my article on Jargon, most people can't talk about God because they don't know that they don't have a shared language on that subject. That shouldn't stop the itallics from publishing a compendium of the survey on descriptions of beliefs so long as it's fair to the contents of the survey it will be representative of the collective understanding or lack thereof by definition.)

Now I see that Playboy Reporter has made some rather inflamatory remarks and some rather insulting offers (which could be interpreted as having said, in essence, "I've done the real work, the peons can do the rest. By the way, I'm going to pick you two to be my peons.)

For all my rationalization and anlysis earlier, I saw this person as being as I said, flip, rude, inconsiderate, and unthinking. My response, given how he had ignored other milder reproofs, was the technique used on stubborn mules. The technical name for this literary device is the '2x4 approach.' I stated that he had been behaving childishl insulting and I said it in a way I thought might get past his selfish insulation from the world.

Having broken the ice, others jumped in the water and said much the same thing in more detail. Of those, I seem to be the only one still willing to try to work this situation out. All the others are either too discusted at the finger pointing or too intimidated to continue.

Playboy Writer has run away leaving a controversy deliberately created to obscure the fact that he had done anything incorrect and firmly based on the old maxim that 'the customer is always right.' And I, who have always *tried* to be moderate in my, admitedly opinionated, criticisms find myself on the verge of being moderated for immoderation while trying to explain what was going on.

Yes, Crescent, we need to hang onto our writers, otherwise you and the rest of the sub-editors would have nothing to edit. But, I would submit more bluntly what I implied above that Playboy Writer was not one of those writers and, trusting the opinions of those who commente earlier in this thread (I haven't taken the time to search them out), his earlier articles are not worthy of the current standards of the guide and need to be replaced, removed, or updated and he, manifestly, is not the purpose to ask to do that task. To restate what he said, he was just here to have fun and if he was writing for something important he would take the time -- clearly, to him this is not important, Let others to whom it is important do the work, obviously, they cannot be less informed than he was and they, at least are willing to search out the information to become informed.

I am somewhat concerned that you have expressed the opinion that, if all you had to do was edit, and had no demands to act as a re-writer you would quit editing. Please, take some of that desire and come down to Peer Reveiw and help these people re-write their own material.

(I think I detect a bit of ivory tower attitude in what you were saying and that is not what I think you meant to say. I would hope you would clarify your point here for us all.)

Now we come to that part of what I have to say that addresses Both of Marks requests (a request from the head italic is somewhat more than a request.)

There are those of us among the researchers who like to write a bit but who mostly enjoy sharing the neat stuff they find on the net. They are a significant part of our population and for them I propose that we add an organized and indexed BBS of Post-it like short notes (proposed index code 'N') that are moderated only in the same fashion that anything on h2g2 is moderated, that is, read and checked for house rules, etc. This should be organized by topics (drop down list which can be added to by the researchrs) and by day of entry as a sort of H2G2 Almanac where external links are allowed to the same extent that they are in articles. Such entries can latter become resources for people writing articles and would serve a postive service to the entire web in providing a kind of growing index to the world wide web which is, admittedly already provided by search engines but this would ideally represent an annotated index which does not exist and cannot come into being any other way. The only real problem here is that these links would become broken as time passed. Which is why they need to be indexed by subject and date. Some policy can be developed for testing links after a certain period of time which can probably be automated if things are set up correctly, such as by checking the page names when the note is submitted and checking later to see if the name is the same after a certain amount of time. Comments should be solicited on this idea and a discussion thread established somewhere else.

There was a comment about being unsure of the age of people on the receiving end of criticism (although the same applies for the source of the criticism). My reply: Not pertinent. Peer Review is for the review of articles by peers who are, by definition, other researchers. If children submit childish articles then they should be treated as childish articles. Give me an article on Winnie the Pooh by a child and I will be happy to treat it as a child's view on that subject. Some one writing on the same topic from an adults point of view deserves and gets a different sort of critique. Un fortunately, or otherwise, most children will not put themselves into this process. Adolescents are another story, but if they present as adults for adult consideration, they deserve to be treated as adults with adult intents, I know for a fact that I deal far differently with someone who is perceptably a young adult feeling hir way into this process. If I can't tell the difference, then there is no difference. If you think otherwise, then perhaps we should all have our age of presentation part of our nickname at the top of the entry. I know of no other way to deal with that issue.

May be we need a junior researcher category and a sort of H2G2 Kidee Land. I wouldn't be for it personally, there you are. The sign-up message clearly inplies that people are expected to be 18 or older or under adult supervision. In short, researchers are expected to be responsible adults or to behave that way.

By now, I imagine you know what I think about mandating or just suggesting short posts. I think you need to say what you need to say to get your point or points across, It may well be that as someone said (sorry, I can't find the posting right now) we should restrict our selves to just one or two points per posting, however, there are times when the poor quality of technical skils like grammar and speling seem to be preventing the author from being able to get the meat of the project working. These are things that are easily fixed in the editing process but, particularly when someone seems to have a really fine article that appears to be being ignored, we tend to flail about a bit with the hopes that by correcting these easily fixable problems it will be easier to see how fine or mediocre an article is. If you look at Arpeggio's long post, for which Mark gaver her a nice pat on the back, you will see that most of what she was pointing to was poor grammar and punctuation. The other issues on content, lack of it and bias were simply easier to point out by picking the parts of the article that offended and commenting on them in context.

There is an article on "Gulliver's Travels" in the que that I did a similar thing for. The author almost ran away, but he decided to give it one more try, which I am grateful for. However, that article is likely to never be right for the guide (I don't believe it was his intention to ever make it right) and should have been in Writer's Workshop the first place. No one is commenting on that article and it will languish there because no one seems to want to get involved with it and I have done all I can till someone else chimes in and changes are made.

My point here is that there ought to be a way where we can sent these article out to be cleaned up so that these long posts aren't necessary. I thought that was what Writers Workshop was about, at least in part. But when the article gets there, it will still need to be cleaned up and we still have no mechanism for that.

There ought to be a Help article on how to cut from here to a word processor, how to use a spell checker, how to use a grammar checker, and how to paste plain text back to h2g2 with particular reference to word processors that treat -->'<-- ticks and -->"<-- double ticks as apostrophes and opening and closing quote and double quote marks which don't cut and paste well. I see brief and inadequate instructions on this subject all the time. Much of these problems can be fixed in this way.

Yes, I could write a guide entry on these subjects but they would be too dry for the guide and should be in Help anyway. If you all want them, I will set my current projects further back on the back burners and put these articles in their places. I can do it and I will. (I've spent too many years as a senior help desk person not to know what needs to be done and how to do it. The trick is to keep it general enough so that things will work on most word processing systems.)

To continue with short posts, it seems obvious that if the italics want to restrict post lengths then the best way to make that happen is to change the software so that posts are abritrarily restricted to some pre-determined length like 250, 500, or 1000 characters. So long as the software works in such a way that the posters are told that they have reached the maximum number of characters, th people will adjust to it though they likely will complain. Shortly, they will start using multiple posts with longer topics and you will be back where you started only with more problems dealing with conprehension, wasted server space, articles spanning the 20 entry per fetch boundaries and other things that I can't begin to anticipate. When you encourage people to get creative with the system (as opposed to the contents), that's when the system starts to break down.

One final comment (if you are still reading) as much as it hurts and as much as it feels like you are treading on the sprouts of creativity, you must somehow come up with a minimum and maximum standard for what you expect out of an artile for the guide.

What I have heard so far about the upper end of inclusiveness seems to be the ordinary encyclopedia, there are plenty of them and there's really no need for another.

The lower end of the scale is much more difficult, if you want to accept anything and fix it in editing, then Peer Review was a mistake. Take in any articles to a private queue get some people who like to re-write thinks and turn them loose on this hidden stuff, sent that to scouts, who should be renamed as critics, let them pass stuff through to the sub-eds who will make sure stuff is clean and ready for approval. Then let the editors arrange things into release sets and make final diecisions on things that somehow made it that far on an unacceptable topic or style.

If things are really changed from the original, mark it 'based on an idea/submission by Whomever' and tack on the names of anyone who touched it and in what capacity.

Be fair about this and,I would expect,it will work well. It also wouldn't hurt to let people know that the article was not suitable for x reason or that it is now in such and such stage of production.

Leaving things hanging around at the bottom of the queue is cruel even if it is caused by being unwilling to be cruel.

You should all check out additional comments on these issues at the streat started by Bright Blue Shorts at //www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F615?thread=120041&post=1030917#p1030917

I don't believe I have anything more to say but I will be watching this thread to see what happens and will be happy if not compelled to reply to questions and criticism. If you want to debate/discuss my standards of lack of them, please, feel free to start a thread on my 'Space.'

Thanks for reading. Your condideration is appreciated. (There will be no charge for this consultation, so there is no need to place great value on it, )

Barton

Oops! As far as the challenge to myself (who had no input for Playboy Witer on Intelligence, only on his attitude and manners) or Arpeggio to write the article. Let me say quickly, that I agree with others who said that it is probably impossible to write a single article on intelligence. I don't know why those who were so adament that it probably couldn't be done should be willing to take up this particular quixotic challange.

Were I completely free from other obligations, I might consider writing a survey of philosophies of intelligence, including the very real and honest assertion of the behaviorists that it doesn't exist. But when I was finished I would have a hefty volume that no one except specialists would read and that would only be to do what was done to poor Playboy Witer -- complain on what had been left out or misinterpreted or put in that was obsolete and inaccurate. That is a task for an acadamician who likes these sorts of disputes.

If you would like an anecdotal article on Intelligence for the guide, as Doug Adams might of written it here it is at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A574724
To save you the trouble of clicking away here is the text
Intelligence
Apology
_The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy_ regrets that is has not been able to find anyone with any intelligence who is willing to write about it.

This may be significant.


-----------------------------------
Send that right off to the sub-editors, it seems pretty definitive to.

Barton

Dearest Crescent. You asked why I only responded to a single line of your rant. Perhaps this will make things clearer.

You wrote:
> "If it is not good enough then write one yourself that is good enough. In fact I look forward to seeing Arpeggio and Bartons Entry, on Intelligence, on the Front Page or a uni project (they seem to be the only peeps here qualified to talk about intelligence). As they say Sh*t or get of the pot."

As they say where I come from, and I understand that there may be cultural difference here, READ THE FREAKING BACKLOG. Arpeggio personally said NINE TIMES in this thread that this subject should not be covered in a single entry. Lots of other people said the same thing. If you managed to miss that then it is clear that you didn't bother to read the thread.

I, personally, have reread this thread so many times I've lost count. I'd be willing to bet that Barton and Arpeggio have reread the thread similar numbers of times to me, if not more. I'm not willing to be lectured on what I, or my friends, should and should not have done by someone who hasn't even read it from front to back even once.

You may also want to read this entry: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A574643

Xanthia - *Mutates to Guardian Aspect*

Lentilla shared this nugget of wisdom: "A few simple words - this is good, could be better - go a long way."

--
Bright Blue Shorts wrote in this thread: "Ok the entry's definitely improving, but I think still some way to go".

Arpeggio wrote in this thread: "Playboy, this is *better*" and "I really think if you flesh out the places where I said MORE, you'll have an excellent paper here". She also made use of multiple smilies and words to flag really good points in her long post.

Mina wrote in this thread: "I liked this article, as it made me feel important"

Barton wrote in this thread: "While I was critcal of, what I take to be, your attitude, I did neglect to congratulate you on the fine progress you have made from where you started. That was wrong of me. Now you can make me feel completely low by explaining that I misunderstood what you were saying and the attitude behind it, perfect this article, and have it submitted for editing and I will grovel at your feet begging forgiveness."

GTBacchus wrote in this thread: "You've done a lot of good work. As you say, it's already more thorough than MANY Edited Entries"

Personally, I wrote in this thread: "you appear to be an excellent writer who understands the English language well and can put together chunks of smooth-flowing, well-written text which will be a tribute to the Guide" and "you write well - some of the sections are frankly superb, and you manage to cover a wide range of subjects while still keeping your entry consistent and well structured. You've found some great internal and external links too - and they really add to the entry"
--

Thank you for your advice, Lentilla. Now tell us something we don't know, and didn't already do. Several times.

The most holy Archangel Silly Willy wrote:

>"On the one hand we have banner adverts everywhere saying, come to the Peer Review, we're all friendly and pleasant, and then when people do, we yell at them and accuse them of being parasites. We go so far that they actualy end up being driven off h2g2."

I was not aware that Playboy Reporter was a plural entity. Your use of "they" would appear to be misleading, unless you would like to tell us about anyone else who has left under similar circumstances? I am similarly unaware of anyone in this thread using the word 'parasite' except, uh, you.

Hope This Helps - Xanthia

Barton - I feel sure that the technical term is actually the 'clue-by-four approach'. You just get your clue-by-four apparatus and repeatedly hit someone with it until a clue lodges in their head. Sometimes the shock of receiving a clue can be so great that the recipient feels the need to lie down and absorb the magnitude of it. At this point you should cease application of the clue stick and steal their wallet.

Rumour is that there will soon be a GuideML Gadget which causes a clue stick to pop out the top of the targets computer and repeatedly knock clues into their skull. Whether its use will be restricted to Italics, or whether it will be one of the oft-promised bonuses to volunteers is not yet known. We do know that it has been determined not to give them to both Guardian Angels and Assistant Community Editors, as the ensuing clue wars would probably put too great a load on the servers.

The Clue-By-Four is also available as Clue-By-Six and Clue-By-Eight varieties, and comes with an optional Neural Access Interface Layer or NAIL.

<--- for the humour impaired

Clearly Playboy Reporter isn't a plural entity. However I have no doubt that if this kind of thing happens again more people will leave.

No-one else used the word parasite, it was a term that perfectly described what Barton accused PlayboyR of doing. If I had been quoting, I'd have used " marks.

Ahh - so when you said "we yell at them and accuse them of being parasites" what you meant is more along the lines of "one person spoke to them in a way which could be interpreted as accusing that one person of being a parasite", perhaps?

If this is your idea of "friendly and pleasant", I'd hate to see you being nasty and mean.