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

Hi Spike,

the updating process could indeed be just as simple as you've said, and that's how I understand Anna's proposal. I think, when there's a possibility to recommend an update to have it done more easily than today, then we've done a major step towards an up-to-date Guide.

A problem with this approach (that's Pete's point, I think) is that the selection of which entry is to be updated is completely random. It could happen that the most outdated entry never gets updated. Thus the proposal for a queue (in *addition* to what you've said), out of which the to-be-updated entries are picked.

To Woodpigeon's point: today, when entries are combined (happens sometimes), it's the Subbie's responsibility to merge different entries and/or forum postings while maintaining a coherent style. As I understand it, that would now be the UpVol's thingy, and I don't know why they couldn't succeed at that. Perhaps the entries stemming from 'This week's topic' are a rather extreme example, with mostly more than 20 people contributing to it, and I agree that these are sup-optimal, style-wise.

SchrEck Inc.

I tend to agree with Woodpigeon, though I do think both ways could work, and they'd both be huge improvements to the system. One advantage of letting the researcher do the updating is that they might well be very familiar with the subject and have lots of ideas themselves, so they should be a lot more motivated to make the updates and receive comments in PR/UN.

As I said before, I also think it's helpful to be able to make changes as the comments are made in the Review Forum, rather than leaving it to a volunteer to have to go through the backlog at a later date.

So, we'd still be better seperating "technical" (spelling, punctuation and layout) updates from "informational" updates, with the former being queued in-house (usually pretty trivial) and the latter being assigned to a researcher/volunteer (time-consuming)...

Apologies if you've all already seen this, but I've summarised the main points so far at A760402. If anyone can see anything I've missed, or have got additional ideas that aren't on there, please point it out on the page and I'll add it on.

Seperating the updates as you suggest might be a good idea, but if I saw a quick grammatical error, I think it'd be quickest if I could quickly make the change myself on a copy of the entry, send it to the in-house team, who could quickly check the change, click accept, and have it changed in the Edited version straight away. This would be taking a short cut from the review forum.

I'd have thought that fixing a spelling error would take the in-house team roughly the same time to check as to do... And having them do it would save them from occasions where the person submitting wanted to substitute a wrong spelling for a correct one.

Well, there's not much difference either way I suppose. Hopefully there aren't too many spelling mistakes anyway (not in the EG). But what about other changes like making subheaders headers (one of the most commonest mistakes I've spotted), or changing an entry about a famous person or event to the past tense after the person dies or the event ends...

Well, I still think the latter should be done in-house, for the sake of rapidity. The Beeb are paranoid about offending anybody...

What's the likelihood of an average researcher noticing a header/subheader problem to report it in the first place?

While I'm here, another form of update I haven't seen mentioned yet is the updating of URLs in non-Guide links. I had to point out at least three of the magazine obituaries linked to on U42 had been removed or moved...

But if the page is even remotely active, an out-of-date url should be caught by the Moderators right?

The problem with DNA's page is that it's sadly inactive so when the urls went down, nobody noticed...

Jimi, the Moderators only check links after a page has been updated... Catch-22 anyone?

*Rudely Interrupts*

Since there is such a lot of discussion on this subject, I have decided to try and create a description of a complete working system at A763418.

I know this jsut creates more to read, but if you read through this and point out any errors or omissions, I will try and incorporate them into the system, or incorporate an explanation of why they are not necessary. In this way, we can know that we are moving toward a solution.

I look forward to hearing your constructive criticisms,
[IMSoP]

Hi Everyone,

Sorry I've let this discussion slip over a number of weeks. I've now read all discussions here relating to the proposed updating scheme and I've responded in the forums of entry A760402 (an excellent entry summarising the themes raised here, put together by Frankie Roberto). It would be great to see you there and hear your thoughts on the next proposal.

Thanks
Anna