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

Ok, so I've done all the official Help Pages (I think!) except for the gML tag ones, past versions of the site ones, and the Volunteer pages. They're all listed in a spreadsheet with relevant data. The SS needs a quick tidy up and then it's ready to go.

I need to talk with Tech about the ones not done yet, and I'll probably go ahead and do the Volunteer ones but it'd be good to get a heads up on if those rewrites have already started.

I had a talk with Ben and she suggested the following as the next move. I'd like to hear what you all think.

- each team assigns one volunteer to work on that Team's pages.

- the pages get assessed for how urgent any changes are and reviews how I assessed the size of rewrite.

- prioritise the pages in terms of how urgent it is and how much work is involved in the rewrite.


Some of it is straight forward, but there are some tricky things to sort too. Most notably is that many of the pages got rewritten/updated as part of barlesque so it's going to be really hard to sort those and the duplicates without knowing if barlesque is part of the sale. IMO the old versions are important because they're old skin specific, but that whole thing is a bit of a mess.

The main duplicates are in the FAQs, which were rewritten in Nov 2010 for barlesque. Which ones to use? Which ones need rewritten? This is a big task as many of the rewrites depend on other pages being re/written and catelogued. Probably someone need to take a meta view of these pages as well as the individual teams.

Old: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/C743

New: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A77393154


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The other issue is that I've done the official Help Pages listed under C550 . This excludes pages in other parts of the h2g2 categorisation system eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/university

I haven't had a good look through those other categories yet, but it seems like there will be lots of out of date pages in the sense of unused, and possible incorrect/needing a rewrite. Do we need to do anything about them before we move?


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I haven't started on the Underguide yet, but would like to talk with whoever the EG Team assigns about how to approach that (have had a few convos with non-team UG people too).


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It'd be good to hear from each team (EG, Community, Tech, Arts, and Business) and who you have available to take on your pages. I'm staying involved as much as I can while continuing with the other help page data collation, and can help with overviews and making sense of stuff.

As I understand it the whole of h2g2 is wrapped up in a 'box' and send over. The 'box' is a virtual machine running h2g2 and this would mean that all the content and all the skins are transferred.
Some parts of h2g2 will not be accessable for the techs to fiddle with the source code and other parts the techs can (and probably will) change.
All in all this means that after the move only the URL of h2g2 has changed and h2g2 looks, sounds, works, smells, tastes and feels the same.

Great job on the Help Pages

We won't be able to make any changes until after we move, as we won't have the option to edit pages (unless we wrote them, obviously!).

At the moment I'm not sure about the Community Team but I know the volunteer schemes will have their own ideas about their pages (but these will probably needed the least amount of change, actually).

The Guide Editorial Team are deep in discussions about how and when we re-write all our Help pages. As we are intending the whole process of the Edited Guide, and the Underguide to remain exactly the same until after transition - there is no urgent need to re-write anything at this moment in time.


We're prioritising and identifying all the help pages, volunteer pages and so on and will have a plan to re-write these as and when the time for change - towards the Unified Guide - becomes a feasible option. This will require technical input, to re-build the forums. So, basically we're not going for major upheaval today. But we ARE planning something splendid for the future

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We're prioritising and identifying all the help pages, volunteer pages and so on and will have a plan to re-write these as and when the time for change - towards the Unified Guide - becomes a feasible option.
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Please tell me I haven't just wasted a month's worth of work

If you are already doing this work, what was the point of me doing it?

Were the Teams even told about the Help Pages project?

My understanding from Ben, who gave me the assignment, is that the point of collating all the Help Page data was:

- to remove all mentions of the bbc asap (even if it's just the week of the move)

- to give the Teams something to work with so they could prioritise which pages needed to be rewritten urgently and which could wait.

- to have the Help Pages in a good state if we get an influx of newbies with any media attention when we move.


Vip, even if the pages can't be changed now, the ones that need urgent rewrites can be rewritten now and cut and pasted in once you have the controls.



Haragai, thanks I'll email you about tidying up the SS if that's ok.

>>>>> Please tell me I haven't just wasted a month's worth of work <<<<

not at all - I am sure that the information you have collected will save us a lot of time in the immediate transition time, where things such as mentions of the BBC, or other urgently needed amendments have been discovered.

Where can we get hold of this information kea, please?


As I said, we are planning to leave things as they are for now, so your overview of the Help pages relating to anything Editorial will be really welcome. Invaluable in fact.

So have you already started identifying and prioritising the EG Help Pages? That was the impression I had from your earlier post.

The spreadsheet needs a few things tidied up, and then Haragai will upload it to googledocs. Then each team can download a copy and work with that themselves. That should be up this week.

I still need a person from each team to work with. I'm not sure what's going on, but Ben and I have been working on this project and what needs to happen and I'm concerned now that it's contrary to what other people are doing.

Tech Team: I still need to know more about what's going to happen with the skins. Is this a conversation that can happen here or should I email you all?

Unless we're not concerned about how the Help Pages look to newbies post-move and are intending to rewrite them at our leisure later, there are some issues that need to be sorted *before* we move. Mostly it's to do with the FAQ mess, but there are also some other issues to do with broken links etc. I'm talking about rewrites for clarity rather than rewrites to introduce new things.

If we thought h2 was hard for newbies to navigate now it's going to be much worse if we move and don't make any changes promptly.

kea, could you email a link to the spreadsheet or post it in the Noseis forums? Or here, even! We should start work on identifying which pages are truly scary.

We could have a google chat meeting to discus...

It's not up yet Ben. I need to tidy a few things and then I'll get Haragai to upload to googledocs. Do you want me to email you the draft?

Basically I see these things as needing to be decided upon nowish:

- what to do with the FAQs. This is completely dependant on what is happening with the skins.

- when to remove all the bbc references. There will be some rewriting in that too, not just removal of words or links. Personally I think this should be done before we go live, but I guess it could happen the week of.

- the Teams need to look at their individual pages and prioritise eg Tech needs to look at some of the DNA pages and decide if it matters if they're left outdated for while.


Can you please clarify if the central intent is to have the Help Page in reasonable shape for newbies post-move? If that's not important, then the timeframes and process change completely.

Well, *I* think we should have things tidied up before the move, but there isn't anything as coherent as a "central intent". We're nowhere near as tightly organised as that!

There's a lot we don't know about what the BBC plan on passing over to the successful bidders and we won't know until the lawyers have tied pretty bows in the red tape.

My feeling is, from a practical level, that each team will tackle these at their own pace, and the best thing to do is hand the different sections over to the different teams, and talk them / walk them through what you are handing over. I'd like to see the pages being re-drafted and re-GMLed ready for the off, but that's just me. I'm a realist and I think that a lot will happen after the move not before.

I also want to find out how you'd create "Community Central" given

(a) no technical changes
(b) some technical changes and
(c) all the technical changes a flightless bird could desire.

B

re the DNA pages - do you mean those that refer to GuideML? I was wondering about those as well. ie the pages that link to the DNAhub eg

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/GuideML-BrowserBugs

Lanza, that particular page is listed as a complete rewrite But there are other HUB pages that are useful. It doesn't matter so much if we lose them, because we have copies and can get the information from them if needed. T'would be a shame though to not have them come across.


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>>Well, *I* think we should have things tidied up before the move, but there isn't anything as coherent as a "central intent". We're nowhere near as tightly organised as that!
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There's quite a bit that will be relatively straightforward, once the barlesque issue is sorted. Many of the pages are tagged as 0 or 1, meaning they either need no rewrite or they need something very minimal.


>>and the best thing to do is hand the different sections over to the different teams, and talk them / walk them through what you are handing over.

I agree Ben. I'm reluctant to hand over if there is no plan. If I'm to stay involved I don't want everything to just spread out into non-accessible places with no-one keeping an overview about what's going on. The one thing that was clear to me from the collation is that if we don't want an even messier system on noohootoo than we have now we need some kind of centralised idea about what to do with the Help Pages. In that sense deciding about the structure of the pages is at least as important as the rewrites.

Meant to say, there's a handful of pages that I've labelled LEGAL that I think absolutely have to be rewritten before we move (some of them at least). They're to do with House Rules, Moderation, Defamation, Copyright etc. I've assumed that the lawyers will need to see the rewrites, so they probably need to be a priority. That's why I need a contact person from the Business Team. Different teams may do the actual rewrite (eg Community does moderation), but I think Business needs to take responsibility for those pages.

Just send it over in an E-mail and tell me what you want done to it.

Ben has told me that some of the Teams have assigned someone to the Help Pages. Can you please post here if that's you? thanks.

*waves to kea*

Hi - tis I, as you'd have guessed,

LB

Thanks Lb Back later (got a bit distracted over the weekend).