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

I've not been around here a lot for the past year. The only reason I'm back is because someone wanted to reprint one of my articles for a book, which was nice, and my account needed to be re-activated. I asked for a copy of the book as my 'fee'.

So, I come back to find that h2g2 is still functioning mainly as a social club/DNA fan club. If I put on my licence payer's hat, I would find it very difficult to justify why most of the input on the site devoted to this. The BBC should ban every conversation that has nothing to do with the EG and the Edited Guide, and let h2g2 concentrate upon what it does best.

If people want to indulge in idle chatter, they can always put links to blogs, Facebook & MySpace on their Personal Spaces which, let's face it, are far better suited to this kind of discussion than the creaky facilties that h2g2 provides. The world has moved on, and there are far better places for idle chatter than here, but h2g2 hasn't realised this. If h2g2 actually grasped the nettle and ceased this kind of hosting, then those of us who enjoyed factual writing for its own sake could do it knowing that it was now an object of first importance.

Good point. I now keep up with a small circle here, mostly in British English The Sequel, and it is a forum that could go elsewhere . . . but would it?

The list of the busiest convesations from the Front Page is:

Well
Yikes 2
9CXth Conversation at Lil's
Atheists
Rights of the few
Lifting an h2g2 Ban
meet the happiest people on earth
Replying to a letter from the prosecutions department of East Midlands Trains.secution.
Greeting from the exile at home
Explain yourself!
Conversation with 100,000 postings imminent - (FAO In-house team)
Just a quick update folks
IELTS test
How about...
Why Facebook?
Makes me feel so ... sad... suicidal.....
Prof calling for a cuupa
What's the best browser software?
Ow
Kitty Abroad

And not a single entry in PR

Thinking some more about it, one could always defend this situation by pointing out that many sports clubs have a social club that is frequented by people who have no intention of playing the game. However, the takings behind the bar generally subsidise the actual sporting facilities in these cases. Moreover, in this case the clubhouse seems to be completely overrunning the sporting aspect. And the licence fee payer ends up picking up the bar bill.

Time to cash up, I think.

How expensive can it be? They cut the staff, I believe, to the bone. Mostly it appears to run itself, which is a situation to be proud of.

I don't think it's a question so much of absolute cost. It's more a matter of what proportion of that cost gets spent on providing facilities that have nothing whatsoever to do with furthering the aims and objectives of the BBC.

I could buy a Mars bar, but if I found out that in reality it cost 10% of its retail value to make and that the remaing 90% was a donation to the Tory party, then I'd stop buying it.

Hm . . . I see we are going to have another single log-in episode. This may imply further coalescence into the overall BBC online community effort, which they seem to value.

Hi FM - good to see marriage hasn't cheered you up.

I think you under-estimate some of the community stuff - I haven't added anything for a few months now (personal stuff) but here I am again, and I often find myself thinking - "I could make a guide entry out of that" when I come across something, so the urge is still there.

Quite. I was inspired out of the blue to put together A55545348

Looks like a marvellous article. I've only just skimmed it but will give it a thorough reading later.

It's a fair point, but one to which I could retort that a newly ploughed field, left to its own devices, will produce far more in the way of indigestible weeds than useful food. Likewise for the community aspect of this site. 99% of that goes on there is rubbish: 1% is interesting, informative or inspiring. The whole lot needs constant tending, though. And weeds are very good at choking out desirable plants.

Hi Felonious,

We stumbled upon your page and thought we'd leave you a message! You make some good points here. In many respects, the slowing down of the Edited Guide simply reflects the reduction of staff numbers. The good news is, after some lean times, h2g2 is about to get some care and attention, as people at the BBC are starting to reassess how they see the site and now appear to be getting behind it again. The amazing thing is, through all this, the site has survived and traffic figures are good.

The model of writing Entries for the EG is robust, if admittedly quiet at the minute. Also, the two central propositions - writing for the EG and a playful community free to express itself - are not mutually exclusive. And we know that most folk simply just visit h2g2 just to read stuff, entries and conversations.

I'd also be wary of reading too much into the popular conversations list - it's not a reliable barometer of the site's health. In fact, we're getting rid of it in the redesign. For instance, when we have users come over to us from other BBC messageboards, as has happened recently, we have threads that rack up hundreds and hundreds of posts per day, sending that conversation right to the top. But that doesn't mean to say their aren't plenty of other conversations that are buoyant, insightful, helpful, playful, curious, creative, friendly - all the values we originally associated with Douglas Adams - and that reflect the best side of the community aspect of the site. We've never had massive conversations around Entries in terms of numbers - but lots of good quality thought and considerate interaction.

h2g2 needs work and there's a long way to go. Truthfully, comments like yours are really very welcome and much appreciated. Discussions like this about the nature and evolution of h2g2 are extremely useful for us, especially at this time, while we plan the design and reshaping of the site. We're optimistic for the future!

All the best,

h2g2 Editors

How nice. Really, feedback is a wonderful thing.

As for weeds choking growth, that is the situation envisaged in the Library of Babel thought-experiment of Borges, expanded by Dawkins and Dennett. If you lived in the Library of Babel (which contains all possible books, limited to a certain size) your chances of coming across a readable one in any language within a lifetime are vanishingly small.

What we have here, which they don't have in the Library, is search engines. They make all the difference; we can cut through weeds.

I always thought a conversation list for Edited Entry postings would be much more useful.

There's a thought.

I've been banging on about it for years.

Sorry not to know that, Mina. This is about the only place our paths seem to cross these days.

More about weeds . . . a quote from Disraeli:

'Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.'

Well, this is the kind of conversation that we are not likely to see on the front page, more's the pity. I'm very glad that the editors showed up here and gave me some of their time to comment upon my observations. I'm also glad that they find what I have to say worth listening to.

I thnik that Mina's suggestion of a conversation forum for the EG is a very good one. One thing I'd like to see introduced is a rating system for articles: simple yes/no answers to three questions. Did you find this entry (a) well-written (b) interesting and (c) informative? Hopefully this should give some of our more self-indulgent authors some clear and unambiguous feedback.

I'm a painfully slow writer, but I do occasionally brew up an entry. And if h2g2 wasn't here, I wouldn't have done anything. I don't have the temperament to write for Wikipedia. I like my work to be mine. And if the community wasn't here, I wouldn't stick around between entries. So that's one good reason for the community.

TRiG.

My feelings entirely, Trig. I like the way that you can continue to edit, correct and improve entries indefinitely (whatever about conversations). And the conversations are enough to make it worth checking back, frequently or in-.