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

On the "Personal Space Etiquette (or, is anywhere on h2g2 private?)" thread the moderators requested that "researchers" not ask fundamental questions of h2g2 at the present time because they were all busy and focusing on fixing up h2g2 on the new site. That is, they are still busy trying to create full functionality of the new site.

Only when they have done all that (maybe in a months time?) will they have the time for a little rest and to start to consider what happens next (if anything). I have a few questions (some of which I raised in the Personal Space thread) but I will now keep "mum" on my thoughts until all those working behind the scenes have finished all the hard work and had a little rest - so I guess it will be in the new year sometime.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for sweeping solutions from the volunteers - they're doing enough hard work as it is.

But as a community, should we not be working out the questions that need to be asked when the time comes?

Mr603 "But as a community, should we not be working out the questions that need to be asked when the time comes?"

That seems wholy reasonable .

I think the moderators/volunteers (Pastey and others I think) were getting sensitive and indicating that the "debate" on that other thread (and others) were along the lines of "demands" and severe "criticisms" which was dispiriting them.

There also seems to have been a lot of tensions and "yikesings" between researcher that was causing the moderator/volunteers a lot of work because the "moderation system" hadn't yet been properly set up.

I haven't quite worked out for myself the purpose of AskH2g2 and "Misc Chat" in practice. I would like better use to be made of the "hundred of thousands to millions" of apparent hits to the actual H2G2 guide - perhaps some chanelling of them into potential researchers and contributors.

'I haven't quite worked out for myself the purpose of AskH2g2 and "Misc Chat" . . .'

I didn't realize they had a 'purpose'.

What's wrong with h2g2?

Too much introspection. Too much navel gazing.

Not enough writing. Not enough researching.

Yes, we need to discuss the site, the guide, the community, where it's going etc and so on, but it seems like every week or fortnight or so there's another thread about how we do things, or what's wrong, or something about site politics, or something similar. If this carries on, the site will end up just being about itself.

That's been the problem for most of this year.

...arguably longer. It went on before in outbursts, but it's been unremitting for a year.

#24 "I didn't realize they had a 'purpose'."

It seems to me that askh2g2 is being used quit often as a "Rant" section - a section for "letting off steam", and as you say a section without "purpose". But I think it is supposed to have a purpose.

However on the other thread (personal space etiquette) one researcher mentioned that it has evolved organically to what it is, and that if it had not been allowed to evolve so then there wouldn't be any "community" left.

I thought it was a place to ask questions. Any questions, from 'Help with Medieval Latin [?]' to 'Should Chief Gordon Lightfoot reinstate the Saskatchewan Rhinoceros Hunt?'.

That's always been the way I've used it.


I usual rant (and occasionally rave) in my journal.

Ask is for asking questions. Misc Chat is for miscellaneous chat that isn't about enquiring about something to other researchers.


603, I think this is a good thread to start. Yes we can naval gaze too much, but I do think there has been alot of stress in the community since the move, for multiple reasons. Having the community talk about that (as opposed to the community asking the Volunteer something) strikes me as healthy and helpful. There is no reason why we can't sort out the problems on this side of the fence ourselves, like we always have in the past (albeit with Ed intervention as required).

I don't get the bit about pushing boundaries, but maybe I'm not in the right threads. It seems normal to me that if we have newly regained freedoms we would exercise them. I've been swearing a bit more, nothing OTT, but it's a joy to be able to use language more freely again.

You know, I've never really wandered through Misc Chat very much (ever?) but I just went over there and there are a bunch of questions on that list.


I'm not sure that it's a good idea to be too rigid about what goes where.

I seem to remember that Misc Chat was spun off of Ask a few years ago and I thought at the time it was sort of a pointless separation.

If people could ignore the stuff they don't like, a lot of problems would be solved. Many find it difficult to let it lie, though. The obvious solution is to provide an 'ignore' button so that we can choose to not see the words of any particular poster. On the old system of the BBC radio 4 boards, a helpful person provided us with the code to create our own 'ignore' function. It worked well.

There were objections, although they often (not always) came from attention-seekers who didn't like being ignored.

Getting new people to stick isn't easy either, and without new people we'll end up staid and boring and having the same conversations over and over again. Sometimes I wonder if we're all just stereotypical old chaps in a pub arguing about the same stories over and over again.

On the plus side, the Edited Guide side of things seems to be picking up again, which is a positive. I think the Guide and Community have become a bit divorced over the last year (when we were all in limbo and waiting for stuff to happen) and having the Guide start to bloom again I hope will bring some positivity and lift (not to mention new readers who might want to stick around).

Was going to post this yesterday, on a different thread, but this seems to be the forum. I hope you've seen the film.

The first rule of h2g2 club is you don't talk about h2g2 club.

there's only so much "not going in that thread because of X, Y or Z researcher playing up in it" that one can do though

if I did that I'd be in nearly none of the threads with interesting titles.

I think that there are accusations of something approaching bullying going on and I think I can see that in some instances it could look like a pre-meditated or discussed-elsewhere ganging up. But I'm not sure that's what it is. I think it's more likely to be that while the BBC were in charge a lot of bad behaviour was tolerated by the researchers because there was nothing anyone could do (alhough expressing disapproval in the thread at the time could have been one) but now the community are doing a bit of that now. Maybe too enthusiatically? who knows

it will settle down soon and there will be a way to keep most of the people happy most of the time.

In the meantime, we may have to hang on to our hats.

>>The obvious solution is to provide an 'ignore' button so that we can choose to not see the words of any particular poster.
<<

Quotes, a big part of h2g2 for me is the debate threads. If I 'ignored' posts I didn't like, what happens when the following two or three pages are responses to the posts I don't like? It's important in the debate threads to follow the actual debates.

h2g2 is also very much about communication for me. I've definitely upped my tolerance skills from being here. I've learnt how to talk with people who's views are quite different than mine and I've learnt alot about myself and them and the world by arguing with them. I've had that experience in RL too, in one community I've lived in, and I count myself very fortunate.

I see the problem at the moment is that too much of the creative energy is on the other side of the fence with the Core Team and the Senior Volunteers. I've been arguing all year for more to come back to the community. Maybe I should just start talking about it here more.

Sho, are you talking about the elephant in the living room?

One thing I find hard at the moment is the rather large amount of statements about things going on, without being specific about the things. So I generally don't know what's been talked about or what people mean.

Is there a reason we can't be specific?

I think the following:

People were very excited during the transition and start up. We are now at the anticlimax stage. Senior volunteers are tired, and things will inevitably move forward a bit more slowly now. Some people will be disappointed and leave. Inevitably, hootoo cannot be all things to all people.

The site is still a bit small - not enough fresh opinions, new views. This means that if some researchers post a lot, they can have a big impact on some parts of the site (mainly ask).

None of this can happen overnight - we need to be careful not to burn out volunteers. As it's now volunteer run, if it starts feeling like work for too many of the volunteers, then we're toast.

There are still a lot of very positive trends though - PR is much better, AWW is starting to move on a bit, najo thing has been very positive for the site, and we've got IMO really good volunteers, and in the right places.

I think we'll have to be patient - threads like this one are normal, but we can't have too many because they don't solve anything in themselves - they have to be acted on, and that takes time and work which is limited. There are lots of good ideas to take the site forward floating around - it's the resource that is lacking.

sprout