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

It was, though it was born out of a thread that stated a problem and asked for answers to it.

I don't think that way would work now, not on this issue.

Ok, well concentrating on the priority bit and the Mission Statement - good stuff!

I've a couple of comments but I'd really like to see db and Lady P's reactions first since they come to this with fresh eyes.

One thing I do think needs clarifying though is the wording of the petition and what exactly people are signing up to. I also want to think about the implications of presenting a petition as opposed to simply making a plea. Just want to think about that.

Would some examples of entries that seem EGable to us but are outside the current boundaries be relevant? Some more UG entries I'd love to see EGable would be;
A1117324 Three Popes - or the Great Schism
A2198496 Submarine Combat
A2213407 After Flixborough
A2084230 How To Take Socks Off, And Live
A2073728 The Mating Habits of the Common or Harbour Seal
A2482553 String Theory (maybe a bit iffy that one)

What's the timetable for this?

I thought that if we just made a sort of society (for lack of a better word) for this purpose, the member list would serve the same purpose as a list of signatures on a petition.
A person signing a petition is different from a person joining a group. The former is an idle activity. Someone can put their name down and forget about it.

Waz has a point. Maybe best to look at it as more of an active group.

It's going to need some formatting and probably spell checking, by the way. That is by no means a complete page.

I reckon any entry that isn't EG'd that was rejected by it should be considered as evidence. I think the announcements section at the end could function as a wonderful way to keep attention on things like this as they happen. For instance, if another of Pin's entries is kicked to the curb, we can say 'Brother Pinniped was ill-treated by the meanies in PR today...'

I like. You've taken care of many important points: variety, evolution, h2g2 as place... however, I think it'll be difficult convincing people that PROD isn't just an opinion piece. I really think we'll have to give examples - figures, example pieces for each statement, perhaps each piece accompanied with a set of suggestions that can transform it into EG material (and look, while I've been typing all this Waz has gone and found some )

I mean, look at some of the objections people can have to each of your points:

--------

"Different is Good"
Oh really? People give out their "original" opinions, then? What good would that be for an encyclopaedic guide?

"Content"
How do you decide what boundaries are then, eh? Won't the EG just become too confusing?

"Mission-Drift"
Preconceptions, huh? How about, we're trying to run this site in a particular way, because we [Beeb, Italics] want something specific out of it? We own this place after all, you know...

"The Next Generation"
Yeah, this is a problem. Y'know what? We'll just put up this big notice that's displayed whenever an entry is submitted to PR - "No DNA tributes here! This is not a fan site"

"Challenging Ourselves"
Hmm, how about we require our members to have at least *one* entry go through PR before they can go off and write whatever they want?

"True Community"
Ah, so the Scouts and the PR folk do all the hard work, eh?

"Stimulating. Varied. Inclusive"
Oh, right. This means that 6 people in all of h2g2 will be doing the writing...

------------

See what I mean? (I'm not saying these are my opinions, just that these are possible responses that should be taken care of *before* this is put up for public consumption.)

I also think that if there's a concrete plan to start with - better articles for the Post for starters - it makes it easier for people to both relate to, and participate in. Not all of what PROD is about will make sense to newbies, and probably not at all to those who hang out in hootoo for just talking (and there's lots of those now).

As Waz pointed out - what are we asking people to do? Is it just a "woo, I feel strongly about this"? or "Yes, that's a cool thing to do, let me help you do that"?

I think this ought to be addressed as a case that needs to be argued, not a call for arms. A case is concrete, and provides ground for precedents. A call for arms can get taken to be for just a few people getting together because they have a common interest. We should be showing how the state of affairs affects everyone on board, and there's something for everyone to do. That'll be powerful.

just my 2 s,

~ db

By the way, I do think that there needs to be an illustration of how it could be - not just what it is, what it should be and why. We need to paint a picture of a guide in which you know that once you click on the entries in the front page, you'll be entertained for the next half hour or so. Imagine a Peer Review buzzing with activity - not because the reviewers feel compelled to do so by duty but because they enjoy reading the entries and responding.

We may need to make more references to the fact that we don't want fiction or anything more radical near the end. From what I remember, it just uses the terms entry over and over with some fancy adjectives. When you hear engaging, stimulating and interesting in front of entry, your mind doesn't immediately go to non-fiction. We need to say we're cultivating the relatively small genre of entertaining non-fiction just as Douglas tackled humorous Science Fiction all those years ago.

(a few thoughts that I didn't want to let get away from me)

"A call for arms can get taken to be for just a few people getting together because they have a common interest. We should be showing how the state of affairs affects everyone on board, and there's something for everyone to do. That'll be powerful."

Echoing that.

So how about we do this: let's split up the search space, and find entries that illustrate what we're talking about, and put them all together?

~ db

Need to be careful not to lose the message in too much detail though. I think we need a few well chosen examples and to be careful how we use them. Links can be distracting.


What the EG should be? Same as what BBC content should be; "high quality, challenging, original, innovative, and engaging."

Jodan, you didn't answer about the timescale.

I need s now. Night all.
Waz

PS just noticed "Please give your name, U-number and gender in the post"! What Brer is the relevance of gender there? You'll be asking what planet people are on next.

Not sure about timescale. I don't think we can put one on this.

I think (and I think Pin agrees) it's decidedly revolutionary to address one's compatriots and comrades in a cause as Brother Pinniped, or Sister Waz (for example). I don't want to end up calling a fella Sister... I thought it was a remarkable act of planning ahead.

Hi Guys
I'm going to try post the Engine, if you're interested.
(GuideML will probably need a few minutes, mind)

Or you could, like Psmith, call everyone 'Comrade'...

~ db

pin: i'm watching

A3989000

Needs a little format-work. Otherwise, what do you think?

(It'll take about a week to read, note)

whoo. that's entertaining, yes - written with typical Pin style. all those threads weaving through each other... i couldn't run through it at one glance - each time the threads switched, i had to restart my conception anew. for instance, there's a great lead up to how the reversing mechanism was devised, and what it meant for the factory that made the Engine, but you don't talk anywhere about why the reversing mechanism was important. why do people want to reverse a 400 tonne engine in two seconds?

sometimes the threads don't come together very easily: what does the cathedral do? for someone who doesn't understand the process of making an engine, it isn't easy to understand. did the cathedral make the boiler plates? did it make armour? both?

i'm sorta distracted now, but i think that it's a little hard for someone who doesn't know anything about steel (like me) to understand the story at first glance. what i got out of it was a feeling of awe, and an appreciation for the engineers of my past. is that what you were aiming at?

sorry if this sounds like a crit, i've been doing too much academic work lately

~ db

PS: what were you planning on using this for, btw?

I wrote it as my attempt at a specimen Entry. It's intended to exemplify the PROD-thing.

If people like it, they could send it to PR and we could have the debate around something concrete.

I know it's flawed. It's overlong for a start, but I don't know where to trim it.

Yes, I was hoping for a feeling of awe. Sorry if I skimped on explanation.

The best way to see why it must reverse is probably to use the rolling pin analogy. In the kitchen, we move the pin and fix the dough. Here the 'dough' (steel) weighs a mere 20 tonnes, but the 'pin' (mill + Engine) weighs about 700 tonnes. So here we move the dough instead. We move it on a table of rollers. Once it's through the rolls (and a bit thinner), we tighten the gap and reverse the mill to take the next pass. So it gets thinner and thinner in a series of reversals, perhaps 30 or 40 reductions in total to get down to its typical finished thickness of 2 inches, this from a starting slabbed ingot at 24 inches.

Yeah, I could have put something like that in. Turgid, though, isn't it? Maybe this is part of the debate, but I think incomplete explanation that the reader can complete by research is better than flogging the piece into the ground by spelling everything out.

This piece still needs links for such explanation, of course. I might link to some steel company sites - some have animations.

The Cathedral - it made armour plate. The Engine was part of the complement of machinery in the Cathedral. It drove the mill. Lesser mills made boiler plate (like Joy's at Barrow - though the valve-gear on that one was the prototype for the big armour plate mills built circa 1900)

A difficult subject, I guess. If it conveys three or four non-technical things, though, that's the main goals achieved. For me, the key messages are :
- the beauty of this particular machine
- the spirit of the city's engineering community, with the Engine as its symbol.
- the proximity of our past
- the 'journey' idea. Creating the lecture was as inspiring as delivering it. Building the Engine was as significant as operating it. Perceptions and impressions, when they are shared like these, are as real and true as any fact.

Pin
-

Delurks, as if by magic.

This is an issue I've been interested in for a long time. Can I make a few points for consideration, mainly based on your PROD rough draft?

Challenging boundaries can undoubtedly be a good thing, but critics of this project (and there will be critics) will expect greater clarity on where the new boundaries are.

Timing. There has been a lot of discussion about this on the site recently, culminating in Ben's fine summaries. Some of the end of this was getting quite stale/going round in circles. It's difficult to know whether the iron is hot at the moment, or whether the people holding the hammers are all looking forward to thinking about something else.

You don't really address the argument - you've got the UG to play with now, so why don't you leave the EG alone? It will come, implicitly or explicitly.

Flame war - good thing or bad thing? The overall message, and especially the bit about low numbers commenting in the EG, is going to go down incredibly badly with at least four or five scouts, ex-scouts and heavy users of PR. I reckon it will get personal before the end of the first LED. Particularly if you go with a concrete example in PR. What will come out of this - you need friction to make a spark, the UG is living proof of this, but where will this one go I wonder? I give you an analogy - police in riot situations are always trained to leave somewhere for an angry crowd to go, before charging in. Where will the 'PR people' fall back to?

Being nicer to newbies is a fine thing when they are genuinely creative. Is the derivative DNA-lite stuff really creative - do we really want to encourage it in AWW? In principle, there's no reason why it couldn't be as good as any of the other stuff we get, in practice, it forms a large chunk of the poor and badly thought through material. What do we want PR people to do with these entries, concretely?

None of what I've just said is very constructive, so I'll try and think about what I might have more constructive to offer in terms of suggestions.

sprout

Yeah, sprout. You can certainly tell it's a committee effort, can't you?
(I don't know if you read the Engine thing, but there are a few nice ironies. One of them is that the firm that bought it was called Cammell and Co.)

Anyhow, let me say what I think in answer to your points.

- Boundaries? I don't (any longer) seek to change them, except in terms of precedence. The Guidelines should never be the main thing in anyone's mind as they read an Entry.
- Timing? I agree it's pretty crap. We missed the best slot, during a camel-spotting expedition. It wasn't a very good debate, anyhow. I don't think Ben, accomplished Editor that she is, did us any great service by affording it respectability.
- UG's ours? You know where I stand on that one. If the UG is a concession in return for accepting EG precedent, then let's get rid of the UG. Whatever the Forum, there's good writing and there's not-so-good writing. Both the EG and the UG are sullied by some dire choices, but the EG is sinking fast now.
- Flaming low-numbers? Just the way I see it, sprout.
- Newbies who stink? If you thought we were advocating a site for DNA-wannabes, we'll need to rewrite. We need to educate, not insult, that's the point.

You do think about it some more, and do be constructive, right? You're one of the ones who can help this. You haven't really touched on the points that seem most important to me, and in particular the dumbing down of PR and the 'lightweight' test.

I'm disappointed, too, that you think a concrete example will cause trouble. It seems a bit inconsistent to suggest that, while at the same time implying in your comments that the PROD goals aren't specific enough. I'm very well aware, believe me, that an Entry that says Pinniped on it risks getting this branded just another personal crusade. So that one might not be the right one. Nobody else is showing much inclination to write it, though, so what am I supposed to do?

"The Guidelines should never be the main thing in anyone's mind as they read an Entry."

That should be on the page. That's a very good point and it should be made loudly.

"UG's ours? You know where I stand on that one. If the UG is a concession in return for accepting EG precedent, then let's get rid of the UG. Whatever the Forum, there's good writing and there's not-so-good writing. Both the EG and the UG are sullied by some dire choices, but the EG is sinking fast now."

One of the major differences between the UG and EG is that the UG is prepared to reject entries that don't meet quality standards.
In setting up the processes, the UG eds and forefathers worried about quality, so we gave a lot of checks (two miners, UG eds and possibly another miner - the h2g2 eds sometimes think that they're one of these checks curiously, when they're not checking their EG entries for quality enough.).
Though clearly the EG's founders must have worried about quality, they did not put in firm processes and precedents for rejecting suitable entries of low quality.

"Challenging boundaries can undoubtedly be a good thing, but critics of this project (and there will be critics) will expect greater clarity on where the new boundaries are."

I don't look at this so much as challenging boundaries as encouraging better entries to come into PR. Some taboos will have to be lifted and allowed, naturally, such as some of the things that got Pin's entries rejected from PR (fractured timeline, creative first person, etc)

"You don't really address the argument - you've got the UG to play with now, so why don't you leave the EG alone? It will come, implicitly or explicitly."

When this was originally being drafted, I worried about writing too much about the UG (after all, most of us here are affiliated with it - to varying degrees), but thought that if we were going to make one point about the UG, that should be it.

"Being nicer to newbies is a fine thing when they are genuinely creative. Is the derivative DNA-lite stuff really creative - do we really want to encourage it in AWW? In principle, there's no reason why it couldn't be as good as any of the other stuff we get, in practice, it forms a large chunk of the poor and badly thought through material. What do we want PR people to do with these entries, concretely?"

I don't think that this is a real problem. The mostly harmless entries are... well, mostly harmless It's been blown out of proportion lately. It was an example of wrong entries in the early days (when it was a problem) and became a classic example for scouts to talk about, but somehow it went from being an example to being an epidemic without much in between

That's all for now. Once y'all have got some constructive stuff together, we'll revise the page, eh?

Sheesh, Pin, after reading something like that I can't care much where it goes, where it's categorised, whatever. I wonder how you care either, it shows how much you think of what h2 could be that you do. It's a whole thing in and of itself and bigger than any EG argument. As with most of what you write, reading it's an experience not a read.

I don't, of course, understand all of the technical bits. To be honest I don't particularly want to, not being mechanically inclined. The impression of scale and power is enough there.

Oh, that last post of mine was of course in reference to post 73.

I'll come back to other stuff (haven't even read Jodan's latest yet), though I'll say now that it'll be uphill work to produce a good piece for the post without first agreeing on approach.