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

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Hey - we are a creative site!

I wasn't thinking in terms of *stealing* stuff - I was thinking in terms of opening out the reach of what we create and show-case here.

I recently rediscovered this site after years away from it. During which the gleefully unnerving ability and implicit encouragement to just write and contribute to a community, and even the very username I first signed up with, have served to turn me onto a moderately entertaining writer with a modest reach among the various internet communities. I may not have contributed much in the way of value, if at all, but the principles of fair play, literary freedom and community contribution have had a lasting effect on me.

I can't offer much detailed analysis of what the guide needs to be, though as a scifi writer I think a fiction section would definitely be nice, but I can say what I would need for this to become a site I use often.

1. Autosharing - I know this is not really the point of h2g2. It's supposed to be the ultimate guide after all, not some cross between wikipedia and facebook. Except of course that it is a cross between wikipedia and facebook, being as it is an online literary information store with an active community. The bottom line for this though is that I can now read a book on an amazon kindle and highlight passages or make notes which are instantly sent to my twitter and facebook accounts, meaning that if the EG were ever released as an ebook I would be able to share it in more ways than I can now. When books have more features than websites, there's something wrong.

2. Interconnectivity with similar sites - H2G2 should retain its purity of concept and just be that real Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, although wikipedia may have supplanted it in general usage, only h2g2 allows authors to put that personal touch onto their works. H2g2 is not alone in being a community of passionate writers though, A Teaspoon And An Open Mind and DeviantArt are two that come to mind which have that same sense of community and writing panache but use it in different ways. If H2G2 became connected to sites such as these then we could track writers across their work areas. DA does audiovisual stuff and fictional writing, Teaspoon does Doctor Who fan fiction. If H2G2 is to remain about the guide and yet still please people wanting to write fiction or post photos then this may be one possible answer. How it would connect is something I don't think I'm qualified to think about but perhaps sections on the homepage highlighting stuff going on in the other sites and an ability to share notifications of work a user has posted to other sites.

3. A downloadable ebook of highlights from the EG and UG - Surely noone needs me to explain this one

Hi Mrs Zen,

I've been giving some thought to this over the past few days. I see h2g2 currently providing the following service elements. There may well be a few more I haven't thought of, and you may think of some of these in combination, but it's my brain dump at this point in time.

h2g2 Service Elements:

A user-written stylised edited guide: The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Earth Edition
A creative writing repository: the Underguide
Community newsletter (The h2g2 Post)
Writing assistance/talent-spotting via PR/EGWW/AWW/FM (Scouts, UG volunteers)
Editing assistance (Sub-editors, UG volunteers)
Content Feedback/corrections (Curators)
Site feedback (Gurus, ACEs, h2g2 Editors)
Community artwork (Community Artists)
Community photography - to illustrate edited entries and Post articles (Photographers)
Pastoral support (ACEs, h2g2 Editors)
Volunteer coordination (h2g2 Editors)
Editorial picture library for illustrating guide entries (h2g2 Editors)
Community AV club (Aviators)
Customisable, restricted-HTML user home pages
Established discussion forums, including Askh2g2, Games Room, etc
User-creatable forums, eg clubs and societies, QI, SEx, Forum, etc
Blog-like journal
Subscribe facility to conversations, forums, journals
Social networking features, including friends' lists, 'Who's online'.
Single-sign on access to BBC Online messageboards, blogs etc.
Automatic recommendations of entries to Twitter and Facebook. (new)
A front page, updated weekly (or so), editorially controlled, including new/featured entries, talking point, etc.
Mobile device support
RSS/Facebook/Twitter feeds of new entries (h2g2 Editors)
Random entry: Infinite Improbability Drive
Full Text search of guide entries
Categorisation system for edited guide entries
Choice of skins (may soon be retired)
Smileys
Help pages
Moderation services
Security, ie house rules and enforcement of a scale of restrictive measures in respect of transgressions. (h2g2 Editors)

Oh, and I haven't included all the 'warranty' services that our hosts provide, like availability (staff to fix it when it goes wrong), capacity (staff to manage storage, bandwidth, etc), security (antivirus, intrusion control, etc) and continuity (Starting the service up on a disaster recovery site if the BBC gets bombed/flooded/burned).


So, why have I listed all these? Well, I believe we need to consider the value of each of these service elements in turn. Which would you want to retain in the new h2g2? You've invited ideas for new ones in this thread, but be aware that h2g2 already has this extensive suite of services already, and it's going to be a complex beast to manage, let alone transition to another provider.

Inspired by the posts about German over at <./>T8027560&skip=20</.> (sorry if my links don't work in noohootoo), I was just walking down memory lane, passing GerManiaConnection (A478055), The Polyglot Plaza (A271379) and the Terran Embassy (U160465), and thinking about how those places in spite of being very small islands in the hootoo sea made "us" feel welcome to the site. Made it a place where we felt at home even though most of what we did around the site was in English.
And then I come here and see what (some of you) are talking about...

An edit function on posts would be okay if (and only if) there was a mark on the post to say it was edited, and the history was available (except where scrubbed by the moderators). This history could be visible to logged-in users only.

Let's imagine a rerun of the Della wars. How would community editors manage that after the BBC?

Which brings us to another question. If we do manage to decamp with the entire database of legacy content, and get the whole lot online again, would we rescind lifetime bans which have been handed out by the BBC?

TRiG.

I think that there&#39;s a number of things that we could do, we could elect a community editor every year who would have ultimate power to do moderation decisions. In the days prior to the BBC then we manged without reactive moderation. I also dno&#39;t think we are going to realistically be able to afford external moderation. We would have to just have a group of volunteers who were moderators.

I personally would be against us allowing children see or join the Guide.

Many conversations here are of an adult nature, and a nine or ten year old could start asking parents awkward questions. If there is to be an age limit, set it at sixteen. At that age, kids are begining to think like adults anyway. Younger than that, and I forsee problems.

GT

We had younger users on the site prior to that and there weren&#39;t any problems. The BBC website is easily available in all schools, and they can easily read h2g2 at the moment, they just can&#39;t post. IF the young person is on the internet they have access to much much more disturbing material than h2g2! All they have to do is go to google and type in a swear word! I used to spend ages looking up naughty words in the dictionary when I was a child, so I hate to think what would have happened if we&#39;d had google.

At one point, I knew a 10-year-old on here http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/U188306. Special circumstances, though--both of her parents were researchers, she was only allowed on if one of her parents (usually her mom, ex-rambling) was with her, and she and her older brother (14 at the time) were being homeschooled, and writing h2g2 entries was part of their curriculum. I think 13 or 14 would be a good age limit--you only have to be 13 to be on FaceBook, and frankly, that place is a bit scarier than here!

Dr Zen, thanks for the list above.

Dear all!
I have begun writing down what the system should do. I'll link to the page in a minute...

Didn't the age rule come in when there was all the fuss about children being groomed on the internet? I think the BBC legal dept probably advised setting the age at 16 for a good reason. Personally, I think you're right, we've always looked out to each other here and it probably wouldn't hurt to lower the age restriction but I still say leave it until the site is up, running and all the bugs are ironed out before discussing such a change. The risks of adverse tabloid reaction are far too great at a time when all the publicity needs to be positive.

A80426018

Here. It looks like carp, I don't know how to make tables, and I can't remember anything of guideML.

Anyone want to help with GuideML?

Are there a couple of people who want to help me collate wants, needs, musts into this document?

Yes OK give me a shout when you are ready

Will you help with guideML, Bob?

Good for you for starting on that, Milla, but it gave me flashbacks to my day job!

Here's a suggestion. I know the Community Consortium are discussing these sorts of business-friendly details - the Interim Committee in particular.

http://groups.google.com/group/h2g2communityconsortium/topics

In the meantime, can we keep this thread for fairly high-level discussions? I hate to use the word "strategic" but I think I might have to. Discussions of principles anyway. Or is that principals?

By the way, that's a good list, Icy. And so's your's Milla, it's just that yours is scarier!

Sorry Ben!
I just thought I'd make some use of my day job...

I'll have to haul my little behind to the google group then...

Do you know if I can publish a google document to the google group only?

It's good work, and vital work Milla. You are preaching to the converted, my dear. I just wanted to use this thread to discuss what we might now be able to do that the BBC wouldn't let us do.

I'm not entirely sure what the constraints are on documents in the Google group. The main google group is open to anyone and some non-hootooers have posted there. ("Strangerrrrrs").

There's also a closed group who've got the time and the energy to really put some effort in. I've not joined that group. The details are in the google group though.

yes

this is a rough page 1 and 2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A80507388?s_fromedit=1

finish the entry layout in this way

Header
Subheader
Text in paragraphs

Additions will be easy

And in h2gnu3

http://www.bbc.co.uk/entry/A80507162