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

ffMike, I agree with all but one of your complaints about the "Guide" - the one I have a problem with is the suggestion that the Guide hosts all graphics displayed. My reasons are simple - the Guide's servers are bloody slow! There are a plethora of servers providing up to 100MB of free webspace which respond noticeably faster than the Guide does... Most of them assume you are going to have HTML there, and force pop-up ads on you, but I have yet to find one which will trap "external" graphics links.

Well, a little bird told me the Guide was expecting some hardware upgrades soon, so that might help a bit. I agree with the present sludgy response, it would be silly to put graphics on H2G2's own servers. Of course, if they take some of the other suggestions here it will result in moving a lot fewer bits across the pipe, which would help.

As for the rest, I've clarified this elsewhere, but I'll do it once again: if you can find a free server that explicitly allows external linking and skipping their ads, that's cool. But if it's agains the server's policies (as it is, for example, on Geocities), then it's theft, and you shouldn't do it. It's not a question of whether they have the technical capability to detect violations of their member agreements, but of whether one ought to violate such an agreement in the first place.

Fair enough... However, if you put an HTML page on the site which also links to the graphic, (as I have done for my "user page" picture) you are within the terms of most providers, whether or not that page is ever visited. It may be against the spirit of their agreement, but the odd illustration here and there will cause no great harm in the great scheme of things.

I hope you're right about the hardware upgrades, because at the moment I tend to go and make coffee while loading long threads, and my blood pressure is too high already!

I am totally in agreement on your stance about writer feedback to edited articles. In fact, I offered a suggestion in the H2G2 Feedback forum, one which I think is totally reasonable, but I was shouted down. Meanwhile, I've had some success correcting editorial blunders, while I've just been forced to live with others. Anyway, the conversation is over here, along with their not-quite-an-answer: http://www.h2g2.com/forumframe.cgi?forum=615

Let's try that again.... http://www.h2g2.com/forumframe.cgi?MESSAGES[(THREADID*29412?forumid*615)THREADS[(THREADID*29412?forumid*615?subset*0)#

Well, I'm not surprised by that non-response. I've gotten a variety of explanations, publicly and privately, from the PTB as to why authorial review is impractical. My own personal theory after observing the evidence is that as long as people are generating content that draws clicks, they don't really care how accurate the content is or what the authors think of the process. And given the seemingly inexhaustible supply of researchers, that's probably a reasonable stand to take. Why work harder than they need to if the vast majority of readers just _don't care_ about these issues?

That does seem to be the resident attitude, yes. But when they only have five articles to post a day, the sheer number of articles just doesn't enter the equation. How hard could it be to check a forum, say "Yes, I see what you mean there," make the changes, and move on? They should be doing that sort of thing just as a quality control process. But now we're talking about quality of the finished product, and you have to be genuinely concerned with this first.

Incidentally, I blame the current quality of editing (or complete lack thereof) on the subs. When the idea was first bandied about, the selection process was something like this:

"Hey, I think I'd like to be a sub."
"Bully for you...here you go!"

Once I reviewed an article in a Fun Run that was so horribly constructed, I felt it was beyond hope. The researcher who wrote that has since edited several of my articles, and there's been problems each time. Now, however, the selection process has been improved, where they actually test you for editing skills. And since I've bitched so much about the quality of editing here, especially on my own articles (I keep a couple of links on my homepage to MY versions, rather than the approved ones, because I think they were ruined, and others have read and concurred), I signed up as a sub. That way, I can assure that at least a few articles make it through that read well.