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

For clubs and societies, and for collaborative writers, it would be handy to have Guide Entries which could be edited by more than one person. Also, perhaps the owner of an Entry could be able to throw it open for anyone to edit.

So far, that would be fairly easy (I imagine). But it would be nice to also have a visible changelog, which might be more complicated to implement. But hey, if Wikipedia can do it, so can we, eh?

Does h2g2 keep a changelog, does anyone know? If so, it would be fairly easy to make it visible. If not, it'd be trickier, but not beyond Jim Lynn's abilities, I'm sure.

Of course, you could always host a separate h2g2 Wiki for collaborative writers to throw their ideas together before submitting them to PR. But that would mean people would have to get used to two different styles of markup. (I know nothing about hosting wikis, but I might experiment with putting one on the Aviators site, just for the sake of the challenge. I don't imagine it would be much used.)

While we're at it, how about a javascript WYSIWYG GuideML editor?

When I get a new computer, and don't have to scrimp my hard drive space, I'll download Open Office and GuideDog. In the meantime, I'll write GuideML by hand (which doesn't bother me).

TRiG.

Rich has suggested the idea of a prototype h2g2 wiki hosted on the aviators website - it's kind of spooky that you've just come up with the same idea. I say go for it.

Alex

We've always emphasised that we don't want to compete with Wiki, haven't we? I think adopting their style runs a risk as well as potential benefit.

I hope we are all agreed that the EG has an Editorial team for a very good reason. And, if we are not, can I recommend reading http://www.nationalpost.com/todays_paper/story.html?id=440268&p=1 ?

The problem is that if you open up this sort of thing for the Community, then there will become increased differentiation between writing for the Guide and using h2g2 to socialise. The AVIators neatly bridge that gulf by doing work on Edited Entries as well as others, but many community pages will not do the same.

Personally, I like the way the Community evolves. Pages are created and then abandoned, some researchers Elvis and others go on to new things. The QI page is little more than a retread of H2IQ. I have many abandoned Community pages which I hope never to speak of again (although h2g2 Researcher Code does still seem to carry a lingering appeal to some).

Speaking as someone who has put together the site's largest collaborative effort, I don't see how a user-editable page would have made that process any quicker.

B