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

I've noticed that their are two bottlenecks in the process, waiting for an entry to be picked from PR, and waiting for it to appear in the EG. People get frustrated with the first but not the second. Once an entry's been picked then the author normally just moves on and starts on the next project.

Is there any reason why curators couldn't pick entries as and when they are ready, and things could wait longer for the front page?

I don't see a reason why those bottlenecks should exist. PR currently has the one-week incubation period. I'm torn about that. On the one hand, some entries are pretty much ready immediately. On the other hand, a week really isn't so long, and gives reviewers the chance to spot problems with an entry. I think I'm in favor of retaining a one-week wait period, but have no problem with an "as and when" policy after that.

Part of the reason for the bottleneck was that the BBC wanted a consistent stream of entries every day (or week, as the case has been). I don't see the need to continue that, necessarily. Why not publish "as and when" an entry is ready? There are disadvantages to this, of course. There is something to be said about knowing that in the morning a new entry or set of entries will be published. I sort of think it would be more interesting to have an ongoing process, too, though. This has left me undecided.

Do "subscribe" buttons and RSS feeds help us out with this?

I think that there should be *something* to read on the front page every morning.

Actually h2g2 is a lot like a scientific journal, like Stroke (I know about Stroke, my boss used to be the Editor).

Articles are submitted, and sent for Peer Review, she would select experts to do the Peer Reviewing and send them off. Then they would be accepted (or rejected) by her, based on the and send to a sub - editor who would make them readable.

As soon as they were readable they available on the journal website, and 'newly published' articles were on the front page in a sidebar.
Every month she would select the articles from the 'newly published' on on the website for the printed journal, she would also write an editorial etc. The print journal would also be available on the website.

People who just wanted to keep up to date would usually just browse the printed journal section on the website, if they didn't subscribe to the journal itself.

Well, I think we need to minimize the role of the editor in the new h2g2... partly because I think h2g2 will be better off, and partly because we've learned it's better not to rely on editors for impetus in terms of the approved guide.

Ideally, in a "rolling" publication format, there should be something new on the front page every morning, but also maybe a few times in the afternoon too. Maybe people will check back more if they know that the front page is constantly changing, rather than changing once-a-day. As Ben says, RSS would help with this.

In our internet, a site that only updates once a day is sort of out of date, I'd say.

Yeah. There's a reason why the h2g2 model's like that. It's because the process was designed before the full flexibility of the web had sunk in.

I've made a couple of points at F48888?thread=8113924&skip=20&show=20#p109474386 - I feel we can remove the bottleneck by allowing the existing Volunteer groups to work together to pick entries as soon as they are ready and push them through to the Approved Guide, with the alternative path of agreeing in principle that an entry is ready but needs taking aside for subbing before becoming Approved.

So a polished entry could be put straight through with the agreement of a Scout and a Sub, and an unreadable but promising entry that is done in PR could be suggested by a Scout and worked on by a Sub until it is ready to be approved.

Alex

Oh thank goodness for a word of sanity - picking an Entry when it is ready. Well, I just love simple solutions to things

Lanzababy

The alternatives seem to be putting everything through, or holding everything up. Plus I'm not keen on renaming volunteers rather than just putting them to good use.