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

Hi Woodpigeon,

I was just dropping you a line to say that it's nice that some people in PR take a little time to make appropriate comments on some Entries written by newbies. I have a nasty feeling that some people would simply rip something like A4769751 to shreds without noting that it came from a 14 year old newbie with a couple of other pretty good first efforts. Abuse (such as that I've seen in PR recently) would have turned me right off when I first started here... come to think of it, didn't you peer review my first Entry as well?

I'm not entirely sure what my point is, but thanks for giving that kid a break. It makes me feel a little better when I'm in the middle of something like F48874?thread=745649 and gives me some faith in the Peer Review process.

Matt

Hey thanks Dr. Matt,

I guess I generally try to understand where it is someone is coming from. I can understand that researchers get exasperated when they see the latest '42' entry or 'skool sux' entry, or some illogical polemic with not a care in the world for the writing guidelines. I give people the benefit of the doubt, but I am turned off by authors who carry on regardless.

The one thing about PR is the different personalities of the reviewers - there is no standard way to review, and I guess most people tend to be themselves when reviewing. It leads to hugely differing styles, and new authors don't really understand this: they can't until they have been through the process a few times. That said, there are quite a few reviewers who do a good job in helping new authors and I have even seen plenty of examples when reviewers who are known to be a bit grumpy at times have been very helpful to new authors also.

It gets easier though! Once a new author has been through PR a few times they know the do's and don'ts fairly well, so my experience as an author has been an overwhelmingly positive one at this stage.

Sorry - a bit of a brain dump there!

I've personally only had one bad experience as an author, and that was around a very senior and prolific member of the community taking issue with some of the clinical details around my Anorexia Entry. She also highlighted some important errors I'd made, so it wasn't too bad, but she ended up being the only one with any negative criticism of the piece (including one post that insinuated that a fair number of my professional colleagues were incompetent) and I eventually just caved to virtually everything she said in order to get some piece and quiet.

I've since moved on to more trivial topics, because PR is generally better natured about this kind of stuff (as long as it's well written). But I see my Anorexia Entry experience being repeated in threads about philosophical pieces, as well as ones that (gasp!) contain too many jokes.

Matt

Yeah, I think I remember that one. There was an objection to the word 'suffering', wasn't there?

I don't know - maybe PR has gotten a bit of bad press because some of the most prolific reviewers can also be a bit ascerbic at times. This is particularly the case when the wrong subject, or a subject they are passionate about but where they disagree with the author, hits their desk. I'm not sure what you can do in such circumstances apart from argue back your case. There's no rule against having a go at the author's work, however, and overall it's probably for the best, even if feathers get ruffled. I did a quick poll some time ago on 50 entries in PR, and I found that about 10% had a posting that could be construed as negative. Which is not bad - 90% were getting on fine at the time.


I think the philosophical pieces are an interesting one. Every so often there are submissions made to PR that seem to be the work of a mad-man! Lunatic stuff: sometimes the pieces can ramble along for pages and pages, without one sentence making any real sense at all! The "Bus Shelter" was a construction created by a researcher here to consign these entries there, and sometimes entries that tend towards the abstract can be put in danger of getting lumped in with this quite extraordinary category. I know, it's a bit nasty: but I love to see how these entries can ruffle feathers here!