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

afaik, this is the first "history" entry to be purged, the rest having been of the "how to" variety.

Since it's becoming increasingly obvious that the "permanent archive" of h2g2 is no such thing and that the deletions *appear* arbitrary, whether they are or not, I'm going to continue to not write anything for Peer Review, unless and until there's a bit of clarificaiton on the logic behind the current purge of edited guide entries.

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I'm forced to wonder how many people would bother to contribute to Peer Review if they realised that at some indeterminate point in the future some lowbrow knuckledragging yahoo could come along and erase the fruits of their time and effort without explanation or recourse.

One of the reasons this site is "sticky" is the feeling it engenders of making a contribution. Unexplained summary deletion s**ts on that contribution. It clearly says "we wanted this once, but we don't want it any more. Don't bother asking why - you are scum who don't deserve to know, and if you're persistent we'll fob you off with meaningless generalities".

I feel an entry for the Edited Guide, or possibly a Help Page, coming on...

H.

One issue (which I think should be the first address) is that we're still not being told about these removals (and they all seem to happen on Fridays, the normal day for covering things up, or letting people deal with on their own). Either posts to Feedback-Editorial or Announcements would be a good thing (or using the Updates Forum in marginal cases).

spelugx

This post has been removed.

This post has been removed.

Hoo, the idea of a Help page suggests a plan to me...

We have the "UnderGuide"; how about setting up the "UnderHelp", mirroring the structure of the official help pages, but "telling it like it is"...

There's already a certain amount of that. Sometimes it is very literally under the official help by being in guroid replies to questions based on misinformation given in those pages. However, the staff don't seem to take very well to too much honesty and truth. Various pages still haven't been fixed despite more than one occasion of them being pointed out as inaccurate or unhelpful.

Spelugx, unless I've missed something somewhere else, I'm not sure we know that this removal was on a Friday.

On a not entirely irrelevant matter, Symphony seems to have been banned on a day other than a Friday. However, there is a certain amount of evidence from the backlog that quite a few removals of various sorts did occur on Fridays. It is less clear whether this is statistically significant - although it could easily be socially significant as many people have also pointed out.

It's possible the removals are something that gets fitted in after all the "scheduled" tasks of the week are done... That would be a less sinister explaination of the "Friday Phenomenon".

Peet, they're already here, although a bit out of date now.

A610390

*reads the entry offsite, shakes head and wonders what it has done to deserve to be pulled. Maybe the disclosure of "a top-secret joint effort between America and the United Kingdom "?*

re: "The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb", I did a little research... You might like to repeat my experiment for your own amusement...

The original entry is at http://web.archive.org/web/20020302062951/http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A684371

Bring it up in a second window, then cut'n'paste random phrases into Google and do a search. Make sure all the phrases are at least ten words long, and unlikely to be replicated by chance. My first three results were:

http://www.freeforessays.com/show_essay/50484.html
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/st/~lovenson/TheDestrucion.html
http://www.needfreeessays.com/viewpaper/26497.html

Each of these was the top hit returned, and contained the exact ten words I was searching for, all together and in the same order. What're the chances of that, eh?

It is my contention, based on my tests so far, that this entry was pulled because it was largely plagarised, with entire sentences and paragraphs just lifted from other publicly available material on the subject with no attempt to rephrase them. It just seems like the copyright police were on the ball for once.

Didn't that old chart months ago say that Historical entries were less likely to be hidden?

Probably, but the clause in the House Rules that all work must be original would take precedence here.

There's another chunk taken from:

http://low.takingitglobal.org/express/article.html?cid=1127

Oop, didn't see your post, Peet

It didn't seem like an editorial policy thing to do. Thanks for clearing it up

I had previously noticed I was getting a lot of hits on such phrases - more so than for the cached BBC page I was looking to find - which is why I ended up finding Whisky's page instead. Assuming the plagiarism doesn't go the other way round (really rather unlikely in this case) it looks as though the original scout, sub-ed or editor checks weren't very thorough in the first place. That's really one for HVL's other thread on PR standards though.

Peet... Just a mo there...

Firstly, before everyone goes off with the impression I'm into plagerising info...

Have a read through the PR thread, it's still there (just a little hard to find - F82061?thread=159736

In all the time it spent in PR it underwent quite a bit of scrutiny by people who didn't like the entry at all - fair enough in my point of view... but I think its fair to say that if it had been plagiarised they'd have been the first people to stuff the fact down my throat.

I picked it out of the flea market and while I'll happily admit I'm not perfect and I might have missed it on this ocassion, one of the first things I do when looking at entries is check them against google.

Plus, if you look at Halitrope's personal space you might see that s/he first mentions the entry in June 2000

Now using www.archive.org

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/st/~lovenson/TheDestrucion.html

Dates back to June 2002
THIS ENTRY WAS PICKED FOR THE EDITED GUIDE SIX MONTHS PRIOR TO THIS DATE

Unfortunately I can't find any dates for the others, but I'd appreciate it if you thought a little before accusing anyone of plagiarism... it's not really something I appreciate.


By the way, plagiarised entries are moderated in the normal way, not removed - I have not received a moderation e-mail for that particular entry and it has not been moderated in the normal way.

slightly p****d off
Whisky

Peet... Just a mo there...

Firstly, before everyone goes off with the impression I'm into plagerising info...

Have a read through the PR thread, it's still there (just a little hard to find - F82061?thread=159736

In all the time it spent in PR it underwent quite a bit of scrutiny by people who didn't like the entry at all - fair enough in my point of view... but I think its fair to say that if it had been plagiarised they'd have been the first people to stuff the fact down my throat.

I picked it out of the flea market and while I'll happily admit I'm not perfect and I might have missed it on this ocassion, one of the first things I do when looking at entries is check them against google.

Plus, if you look at Halitrope's personal space you might see that s/he first mentions the entry in June 2000

Now using www.archive.org

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/st/~lovenson/TheDestrucion.html

Dates back to June 2002
THIS ENTRY WAS PICKED FOR THE EDITED GUIDE SIX MONTHS PRIOR TO THIS DATE

Unfortunately I can't find any dates for the others, but I'd appreciate it if you thought a little before accusing anyone of plagiarism... it's not really something I appreciate.


By the way, plagiarised entries are moderated in the normal way, not removed - I have not received a moderation e-mail for that particular entry and it has not been moderated in the normal way.

slightly p****d off
Whisky