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

The first thing I want to say is that I entirely support a more holistic approach to the content of the new hootoo.

It seems unnecessarily prescriptive to put a barrier between, say, a purely factual article on the history of Brighton, and a more personal, impressionistic account of the city.

However, I do have reservations about the collaborative editing approach you have suggested. One area where I don't think it would work is poetry.

I'm a poet - OK, I call myself a minorvogonpoet - but I'm still a poet. I read poetry, I write poetry and I've put my poems on this site. Some of them have been bad (particularly when I've been trying out an unfamiliar form, such as the sestina) but I'm quite proud of a few of them.

But I'd be reluctant to subject poetry to the collaborative editing approach for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, modern poetry is tremendously variable. There are people who still mantain that all poetry should rhyme, while there are others who try out minimalist or concrete forms.

Secondly, if you do bother to study poetry in more depth, you find it has technical stuff which prose doesn't necessarily have. To put it personally, I wouldn't, for example, want someone who has never critiqued a poem before to look at a villanelle I have written and say it's bad because it contains a lot of repetition. I would be entitled to answer 'villanelles are supposed to be like that'.

So, I suppose I'm saying that either:

the original author must have a veto (and this would apply to prose as well as poetry);

Or, you need to ensure that at least some of your curators who select and comment on poetry know a thing or two about poetry.

Have I just volunteered for something?

Yes, of course you're right. I have always thought that the Curator/sub-ed should be in direct, constant communication with the writer. And I'm sure there would become a sort of eventual specialization of volunteers into things they're interested in.

You're right, though. There's a reason I avoided editing poetry when I was editor of the UnderGuide.