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

... or are the boundaries drawn in the right place?

B

To what do you refer? From the entries I've seen, the only error is their incompleteness and limited number.

Oops!

The question remains though, "Is the edited guide to conservative, or are the boundaries drawn in the right place?"

For the record - and before this conversation derails any further - I am not talking about sexual content.

B

I think you'd need to be a bit more specific to get a good response...
What about:

1 Do you think entries have been rejected by the editors for reasons of caution, which you think should have been accepted for the Edited Guide?

2 Do you think there are entries left unpicked by the scouts, which you think should be part of the edited guide?

3 Are there worthwhile topics which people don't even bother writing about, because they assume that the entries will not be accepted?

My answers would be
1 probably not
2 hardly ever (given enough time)
3 there are so many areas still wide open for entries that I don't see any way of judging this.


Azara

Good point, Azara. Let's go with those questions then, boys and girls and small little creatures from alpha centuri.

B

Okay, I think that part of the problem is that the edited guide has a kind of fetishised status. It's what the community has grown up around, but there are a great many researchers who do quite a limited amount of researching, or just review the work of others, etc etc etc.

I suggest that the problem isn't that the guide is too conservative, but that getting stuff into the guide is seen as too important. This is one of the reasons why I started Speakers Corner, which hasn't exactly been an unqualified success so far, but it's an alternative place to get attention.

Obviously The Post is another place for entries to go, but I think the "Ask the H2G2 Community" is actually a better way of getting attention for your writings, if that's what you want. Peer review is a good way of attention, followed by one day on the front page, and then obscurity unless other entries link to it. Okay, you can search for things specifically in the "edited guide", but this isn't even the default option.

I say leave the Edited Guide more or less as it is, but adjust the way we see it, and the prestige attached to it. It may once have been the raison d'etre (reason for being) of this site, but that just ain't the case no more.

Just my thought.

Otto

I think Ben is more talking about the overall tone of guide entries these days. If you look at entries from 2000 they were sometimes only one paragraph long, but held about three times the amount of wit and information.

There is too much of a drive to fill in the gaps of the guide for the sake of filling in the gaps. There should be a drive to get people to write stuff about what they know *and why it is useful and interesting* to the people that are reading it.

I think the guide is becoming more dry and too strictly factual. See the entry today on "Pressure" A835409, which is an excellent and accurate piece of work, but how is it useful to everyone in their lives? I always thought of the guide as being an unconventional sideways look at life (the universe, etc.), full of nuggets of genuinly useful, entertaining information and witty writing.

If an entry is about to be a purely factual affair I think it should be stopped, turned around and given a little push in the direction of the door named "relevance to peoples lives" and "humour".

That's my 2ps worth anyway.

Ste

PS No offence Hell, the entry on Pressure is really very good in its own right.

I don't follow Peer Review or read new entries religiously enough to feel highly qualified to comment... but in defense of the Editors, I've seen some rather liberal entries sneak into the Guide.

I agree with the opinion expressed in A715330 "'Black Hawk Down' - An American Fable", but at the time, I thought it was too politically oriented to get into the Edited Guide.

Others might be A679025 "The US Presidential Election 2000 - A Democrat's Perspective", and at one time I thought this deleted entry was accepted to the Edited Guide = A697557 "Vietnam - America's Mistake." (there is an unedited version still viewable if you search around for it.)

I'm still a little confused about how those entries made it into the Edited Guide, considering the guideline to keep entries "balanced." But if a conservative person argued that the Edited Guide had a liberal slant, and used those three articles as evidence, I don't know how I could refute the idea. ...Unless there are several examples of conservative entries accepted to the Edited Guide that slipped past me?

I think Otto Fish has got a good point there. Edited entries are rather conservaertive while general discussion is free floatin (with the Mods being somewhat repressive on things they don't understand straight off, loike foreign languages)...

Yes (the answer to Ben's original question)

It's definitely moving towards the square.

The original entries were off beat (and for the most part unfunny admittedly) ... but now any attempt at quirky zingy writing is curtailed in pursuit of a business-like "encyclopaedic style".

Clearly, I am still smarting from having my reference to "camembert smelling like freshly spilled semen" edited out.

Dr Montague Trout

Cheesed off? Dr T?



B

Why is it, when I saw this thread title in the list, I immediately thought of you, Ben?

As with any other publication (and DNA made quite a good point about this in 'Mostly Harmless'), the acceptable content is what the Editors want it to be. As with all the dailies, we are sadly a dictatorship.

On the other hand, it could be argued that, by removing all vaguely entertaining entries/references/similes, we are not sticking to the original Mission Statement, which was to create a Guide to Earth in the mould of the original HHGTTG.

"Much of what is contained within the Guide is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate"

B

Also answering the original question, the one in the title, - yes.

I can see entries with style and originality getting spoilt by pressure to add detail, facts and completeness. (The peer review process tends to be slanted in that direction.) A824267 is an example where the original idea, advice on the artistry of clothes line hanging, has been rather lost. You can still see traces of it.

There are already encyclopaedic web sites out there (I'm sure I've said that before somewhere). h2 should be offering something different. Particularly now that we're part of the BBC which has its own store of fact based articles. Not to mention Sense of Place which is developing entries based on ... well, places, of course. And 360 covering anything to do with solutions to just about any world problem you can think of; which probably covers everything that's left. Except cookery maybe.

The edited guide part of h2 needs it's own style and I think the current guidelines are too narrow for that to develop. What does make h2's guide different at present is the personal touch of the entries. As the updating process gets underway I can see that disappearing.

My 2p for what it's worth.

Perhaps what we need is an official parallel alternative guide.

Perhaps some sort of pressure group might be in order:

Combind Researchers Against Pedantry, Preferring Editorial Relaxation.

Ah...one small problem, the acronym spells 'crapper'.

B

One more point (sorry) Otto said

"It may once have been the raison d'etre (reason for being) of this site, but that just ain't the case no more."

Then what is the purpose? Or are we happy not to have one?

Alternative Reseachers for Style and Originality?

Guide Reseachers for Originality, Purpose and Style? Who might form a nice alliance with a previous subversive pressure group.

A858864 is simply pizza cheese, but some with H2G2-ness added in. Take out those quirks, and I may as well cut and paste a link to (or the text from) a cheese web-site.

DMT