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

Hi Dr Mo

I just wanted to ask you if you are interested to become a volunteer again? Many things have changed, but if you like I can tell you a few things about the new Artists volunteer scheme.

Sure you can tell me

Are there other artists currently operating?

Do e will use a really weird system for uploading images?

We are currently 3 active artists who take care of the illustrations for all Entries - unless the author of the Entry submits something. And yes, unfortunately we have to use an off-site system to submit and talk about pictures. We use Trello, like most other volunteers do (Sub-Eds etc).

There is now no difference between Artists and Photographers anymore, everything is welcome - drawings, Photoshop paintings, photo manipulations and actual photos.

Basically we have a list of all Entries which were picked from PR and anyone who likes can submit pictures for any of them. Sometimes there are multiple ideas and we choose the best. If we see good chances that the writer of an Entry may have pictures we ask them for a submission.

That's interesting.

So what do you do if you wanted to submit smilies?

What would happen if I submitted an animated svg, or just a regular svg image?

Shame about the systems, isn't trello a management board? so does this mean images are uploaded by someone special? Or hosted off-site?

At the moment nobody is working on smilies. In the past we released some in special projects.

We only make regular jpgs at the moment. I'd have to ask Robbie and Brian about their opinion of them. At the moment I guess we just have nobody who does anything like that.

Trello allows us to collaborate within the volunteer teams as well as across teams. We can keep things in order and see which work is already done and what needs doing and who works on what.
Images are uploaded to Trello by all of us. Once an illustration is considered finished it is uploaded by Bluebottle to h2g2's image library. From this time on anyone on h2g2 theoretically has the possibility to use it on Entries or their PS. In reality it's mostly the Guide Editors who will take the pictures and put them on the Entries where they belong.

Aye, it's a similar process to what I remember way back when.

It's not exactly media-wiki level technology, which is a shame. We've sort of moved really far from where we were back in the 90s wrt things like image formats, licensing, and the way images are staged and approved.

but it sounds like we're stuck here with an old system which is a shame.

Not sure if I'd get frustrated as a programmer, not being able to fix the workflow to get images done.

I'm not a programmer, so I can't tell you much, but as far as I can understand there are still lots of programming issues that have to be solved on hootoo. Some things were ripped out when the BBC handed over the code, some things were badly maintained over the years.