A Conversation for The History of "The Short Guide to Short Words"
The Revised Entry
Smij - Formerly Jimster Started conversation May 21, 2002
As those of you who've been involved in this thread for a while will know, this entry was taken out of Peer Review because of concerns about its content. While these were resolved, the entry was also hidden.
As it stood, the content itself contravened h2g2's own Moderation guidelines as well as the BBC's. If this were to go into the Edited Guide, usually that would mean it would have a day on the Front Page and, via the Communicate section, possibly the BBCi Homepage. As BBC Guidelines strictly state that all material accessible via one click of the homepage/toolbar must be suitable for a family audience, we couldn't risk this.
So, clearly, it would have to be rewritten, and agcBen was notified of this. As agcBen's original entry has been through the Peer Review process (where it then stalled because of the moderation issue), the editing and subbing was brought in-house to ensure the entry wasn't kept waiting any longer after a moderation decision was made.
I've now gone through the entry and carefully worked the entry so that any swear-words that appear are editorially justified (which meant that a very few references had to be removed as they were more references than actual discussions about the words themselves). But the bulk of agcBen's original entry remains. The main issue here is one of context, which the new introduction to the entry hopefully spells out. It also ensures that anyone who "stumbles" across this entry by accident has to scroll down the screen to see anything "naughty".
As we're still cautious about this appearing on the BBC homepage, the decision has been taken not to allow this to appear on the h2g2 Front Page. The entry is, however, now part of the Edited Guide and can be found at A753527.
Regards,
Jimster
Editorial Assistant, h2g2
The Revised Entry
a girl called Ben Posted May 21, 2002
Jimster, I am so pleased about this. I wrote the first draft (which was about half the length of the final version in PR) alone in a seedy hotel in Stockholm at 3.00am one night late in April 2001.
It has been a long wait, but worth it.
Thanks
Ben
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