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

Thank you Anna.

Having slept on it again, and read Gnomon's conciliatory words, I am willing to soften my position. I am content for the title to become 'Rainbows End - Fact and Fiction' or indeed 'Rainbows End: Fact and Fiction' and for the text to remain as you have edited it; but I would recommend the inclusion of the new Dan Dennett reference to the factual/fictional nature of consciousness.

My last paragraph (before the 'Related BBC Links' one) therefore now becomes:

It is in our consciousnessIn Consciousness Explained (Little Brown & Company, 1991) Daniel Dennett concludes that consciousness itself belongs in a unique category between fact and fiction. that every rainbow we see comes to a single and perfect end. It is also in consciousness that all the values in the universe are situated. For such boundless riches 'a crock of gold' is a poor enough metaphor.

Are we there?

Dear Recumbentman,

Absolutely I'm so pleased Nice footnote, too. Thanks Gnomon! I've made the changes and it should be up on the front page soon.

Anna

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

Oh-oh . . . a gremlin has struck in footnote 1.

'Leath-brógán' has lost the last 'a' out from under its accent.

Alt-160 should get it in ASCII

Jeepers this gremlin has it in for me!

'Ephemeral' has acquired a spelling mistake. (Illusion? paragraph, first line)

Actually I never said they are ephemeral at all. Sorry gremlin, that wasn't you.

Calling rainbows ephemeral is a red herring, but . . . I give up. Do correct the spleling though, please.

Hey Recumbentman,

I am online but am writing up the topic of the week today, and am under pressure as I went on a course this morning. I'll make those changes tomorrow and have stuck a reminder to my computer!

Catch up soon!

Anna

ta

Please Anna, one last favour . . . just delete "an ephemoral entity such as" from the line after the first header. I never wrote that, it adds nothing, it is merely distracting stuffing, of the kind I was rude enough to call "arbitrary disimprovement" a while back.

Eternally grateful

done those.

Have a good weekend

Anna

Recumbentman - not wishing to rush you, but have you come to a decision? You're clearly giving this a lot of considered thought - I see from your space that you've been online today, and I'm following this closely because, as a Scout and a Sub myself, the experience of Authors is very important to me.

Whoami?

Should have read over the page!
I'm glad to see this story had a happy ending...

Whoami?

Well it's good to have your concern. Happy ending for Anna perhaps, but I can't say I'm greatly happy. The first enty I wrote that made it to the fromt page was A901036 "Recumbent Bikes - the Future is Laid-back" which in my version is A891830 "Cycling: the future is laidback". The hyphen in 'laid-back' makes me squirm, but the editors insist on following the Concise Oxford. I prefer Chambers which is as inclusive as Oxford is exclusive. In the edited version, besides a longish-running disagreement about the title, there are a few arbitrary disimprovements, including the insertion of a fatuous definition of 'fairing', and a completely new punctuation error (see the conversation "Missing space?"); and despite many objections from me a sub-header (Feel funny?) was promoted to a header, spoiling the otherwise logical sequence of headers.

In the rainbow piece, a sentence has been omitted to the detriment of both sense and style. After "For one thing rainbows are equally visible to all, can be photographed and are rationally discussable in a way that many 'subjective' experiences are not.", I had written "For three things, that is." Why has this been excised? Not only does it correct the wrongness of "For one thing" but it does it in a style reminiscent , if not of Douglas Adams, then at least of Sam Beckett, and adds a touch of lightness that does not in my opinion deserve censorship.

You gather I am still smarting, and my opinion of the editorial process is not high. If you visit my personal space and read my little poems I hope you will admit I have some grasp of English diction, grammar, flow and form. All I have seen done to my pieces by h2g2 editors has come under the heading of 'arbitrary disimprovements', and it is not even mitigated by the standard of correction of errors (in my friend Gnomon's front page piece on Champagne, easily-checked misspellings of Jeroboam and Rehoboam were let through; other pieces reach the fromt page with dodgy if not well and truly mangled syntax).

Thank you for your time and attention, is that what you were enquiring about?

Not Rehoboam, Methuselah.

My dream was that Anna or whoever was entrusted with the decision would say "Goodness me, this person writes almost as well as I do, and furthermore he has judged the tenor of the h2g2 community to a T! Restrict the sub-editor's input to the rewriting of his meticulous double spaces after fullstops and such technicalities, and publish as submitted!"

Ah me.

I'm sorry that you're not happy with the quality of sub-editing. I know from what you say that you will be reluctant to submit anything further as a result. What a pity! There is obviously a lot you could contribute to the Guide.

I found at the start that sub-editors used to play around with the English of my entries, but they don't seem to do it anymore. They restrict themselves to adding links, tidying the GuideML and correcting spellings. (Though a few got through). I don't know why it should be different for you.

It's important to remember that what makes perfect sense to you might not make any sense at all to someone else. As a Sub, the only thing that I do not ever intend to change is someone's writing style. This means that I correct information, spelling, grammar, punctuation, GuideML, add clarification of some points, add and subtract links as necessary, and also may completely rework passages if they don't fit or don't make sense. This reworking goes from re-ordering paragraphs to the kind of rewrite that is sometimes necessary for people writing in English as a second or third language.

The Editorial Process is robust and effective in my opinion. Some things will always get changed, but it is always done with the best intentions.

Please don't stop Writing for the Edited Guide, you should be happy that someone has given their time, in the Subs' case without pay, to work on your Entries, rather than getting upset about the little things that happen during editing. Just because you personally consider something superfluous, unnecessary or whatever doesn't mean that you're right - sometimes you will be, sometimes you just have to let things go.

You are clearly a talented writer who takes great pride in their work. That's fine, and indeed admirable, but in my opinion, having something considered good enough to be edited is something to be proud of, and disputing the changes that are made is really only productive where the meaning is lost or where factual inaccuracies are introduced.

Whoami?

'My dream was that Anna or whoever was entrusted with the decision would say "Goodness me, this person writes almost as well as I do, and furthermore he has judged the tenor of the h2g2 community to a T! Restrict the sub-editor's input to the rewriting of his meticulous double spaces after fullstops and such technicalities, and publish as submitted!"'

In response to that, it's only a dream. The job of a Sub would not be rewarding if all it involved was fixing typos. We'd be little more than machine spellcheckers. What you're looking for appears to be an editorial process that involves little or no actual editing. That would rather defeat the point of having such a process.

Whoami?

I've had entries go through the editorial process without a single character of them being changed. So it is possible.

Possible, yes. But not something that you ought to *expect*.