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

I'm nearly finished by "14 Sights of Istanbul" at A446230. I hope it will be well received.

But we really need more writers. There haven't been any Edited Entries at all published in the last month, and most of the ones in Peer Review at the moment are by the Editors themselves. If people don't write entries, the Guide will stagnate and people will stop reading it. Once the readers stop visiting the site, that will be the end of Douglas Adams's great vision.

You're write. We do need to write more. The entries in Peer Review are great, and I've enjoyed reading them.

And now is a great time to write, it's likely to get through very quickly..

Also love the 14 sights of Instanbul.

Just put an entry in peer review. I've also released that I should write a entry about Peer Review (the scientific process) to put in Peer review.

Think I've two or three in at the moment, and two more oughta be finished and in by the end of this week coming, if not more depending how the writing mood takes me over the course of the week and the week after that should see another couple finished... I always meant* to write more entrys, but just find it hard getting started on them, and* remembering to finish them ,biro>

Yes.


Because of the stagnation of the FrontPage, I've also picked my own brain for possible subjects for an article. I've got one in mind if I can find the time to sit down and write it. I'm going to write one on something I know. Proton radiation therapy. I was a patient at the PRT center in Houston, Texas before they officially opened (guinnea pig).

I look forward to researching the subject to see what changes have happened in the 8 or so years since I had my treatment. My radio-ontologist, Dr. Woo had mentioned they were looking forward to upgrading to a tracking beam, like a CRT and also having live scans during treatment so they could hit moving targets like lung tumors while the patients breath.

Maybe I'll flesh out an outline while I sit here at the pub. How well does Guide ML work with android devices?

I think we've all known for a long time that the Edited Guide is in crisis, and I'm not sure we can fix it alone. We need new writers.

I believe the guys running the site are trying to relaunch it and make it more appealing to writers, however this has clearly taken much longer than anyone anticipated, and I don't believe they have the medium and short term plans to keep the EG alive.

We do need some new ideas, and they may have to come from outside. I started a brainstorm thread on this subject recently, and, although I an heartened to see that people are contributing it, we're not really getting the good ideas to improve participation. It seems to be attracting lots of cosmetic items about site design.

Icy, you're right. We need new writers and new ideas. I didn't contribute to your brainstorm because I have no new ideas.

Baron, guideml works ok with android as long as you don't try to edit anything using the pliny system. Do your editing in alabaster or goo. You can use pliny for displaying the results in a separate tab. It can't display italics or table borders and it rams all images and smileys against the right margin but these may eventually be fixed.

Now is a great time for new writers to join, things are likely to move quickly so they won't be waiting long.
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Ah, I think the italic bug may now be fixed.

How long have you and others been saying exactly that, Woolly Mammoth?

The facts that participation has deteriorated inexorably - even since the crises that we had towards the end of the BBC's tenure and the subsequent takeover - and that we have seen no plan of any sort in the years since lead me to believe that the participation crisis is not likely to be resolved quickly.

I invite anyone to demonstrate now that I am judging the situation wrongly, but in the meantime I will press for the wider community to contemplate where we are and consider what actions we can take to save this project.

I agree with you. Like you i've put lot into h2g2 over the years and i want to see participation increase not decrease.

Amen, folks. We've got more people writing for - and we welcome all we can get - but we need more different voices in the Guide Entries.

I'll bet everyone out there has at least one Guide Entry topic they could do quickly - let's get cracking!

Remember, too: it doesn't have to be a major opus. Personally, I prefer to read Guide Entries that are brief and to the point., not the 'last word' on some massive topic. That's just a personal preference, but a 1000-word (or less) Entry is very doable.

I always recommend that people should write between 500 and 1,000 words in a Guide Entry, although I go way beyond that myself.

I wrote a piece about Barbershop Quartets and then lost it when it failed to post. Could try again ... I undertake to do it in April.

........

Back. Did you miss me?

Totally agree with all that is being said about new writers. They don't have to be new members of h2g2. We've got lots of people who must have something interesting to write about.

That was one of the major goals of setting up Create, in order to support new people writing for the Guide. Somehow, since the responsibility for Create was taken away from the GEs (Solnushka and I) and is now the responsibility of the Community Eds, it seems to have a sort of expectation that it's mainly designed for the Post. Not that that is a bad thing, but it now appears that only Volunteers have written for Create for the past few months. And I think they'd be writing anyway, without Create.

Anyway, I no longer have any input into it. But I have mentioned my feelings to the Core Team. I'm just telling you the same thing as well, so we're all on the same page and communicating clearly.

One thing which I did mull over last evening, was the fact that we pride ourselves in being a 'writing' site. Rather than a Guide. Maybe we need to reconsider this aspect. I don't see much in the way of improving writing style and so on happening. We mostly accept things the way they are sent in, improving bits of grammar or incomprehensible paragraphs.

For ages now I've been thinking about how to explain what will make an Entry stand out, both in search terms and in enjoyability of reading. We want our stuff to be found and read, otherwise we'd not bother writing it surely? Long entries about every single aspect of a subject only work if the subject itself is one that requires every thing documented. Some of Bluebottle's film stuff works well, and people find it via google for precisely those reasons.

Others, such as Icy's Entry about Pan Yan Pickle A87796453, 'tell the story' of the subject matter. The text is carefully constructed to be both readable and informative. As a reader you are entertained and enlightened. That to me is the point of a good Guide Entry.

If I could encapsulate this somehow into some message and get it out to the community - we want to hear their voices, not make them drudge write a vast essay. Maybe they have bad memories of writing essays at school and we're a bit like that? Dunno. Am I rambling?

Did ya miss me? ooops I said that at the start.

ps I am sorry to hear you lost some work Recumbentman. That must be really frustrating. I think there is an issue with the page not cache-ing your work. If for instance you leave a tab open and then go to browse another site, after X number of minutes inactivity it stops saving it. Although we've looked into this problem I am not certain it is cured yet, but I most certainly have been in discussion and have tested various scenarios and it's logged with Milla and Pastey.

In the meantime, I suggest you save frequently, or keep a separate copy of the text in notepad or somewhere.

Hi Lanzababy

One idea I'm developing is to do with harnessing the wisdom of all the distinguished alumni writers/contributors we have - in particular those who aren't currently active volunteers. These would be people who have invested a lot into the project in the past, but now lurk occasionally (some may do a bit of curating or something, but not as part of the core volunteer group).

If I could get a small 'brains trust' going, then we could approach these - what would you call them - 'mandarins', 'men in grey suits', whatever. and see what ideas they have. It would probably have to be off-site, though, initially.

Lanza, welcome back. Of course we missed ya!

You say

"we pride ourselves in being a 'writing' site. Rather than a Guide. Maybe we need to reconsider this aspect. "

I wasn't clear on whether you meant:

"Since we are a Writing site, we should offer more advice on how to write"

or

"Since we are really a Guide, we should concentrate more on Guidey things, and not pride ourselves so much on our writing."

I personally have always considered h2g2 to be not just _a_ Guide but _the_ Guide. I'll offer advice on how to improve writing style to anybody who wants it, but I don't think we should be writing for the sake of writing, but rather for the sake of expanding and improving the Guide.

Lanza! s round like a over-excited puppy not sure what else to suggest, about increasing writing/submisions... but definatly need new blood (wheahter that be old-time researchers who've been crap at actually doing entrys (like me), or new registered researchers, getting both groups writing would be good of course, and perhaps not leave us so relient on those with the writing skills who've done hundreds and hudnreds of entrys already (though more from those, is good too... they know who they are )