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

Hi Everyone! I'm sorry about all the guide entries. The history of medicine ones are all mistakes except the one entitled just "The History of Medicine". (I changed how I was going to organise the info half way through!)

Anyway enjoy the articles. The best is the History of Medicine one - it was what I had to learn for my GCSE history exam which is why I know so much - but I may have missed some things out. If I have please tell me!

Hi there!
Was was just dropping by because of your name, thought you might be someone else. Never mind

As for the entries, if you do want them to be noticed and a full part of H2G2 you'd need to submit them to the so called Peer Review at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/peerreview
(A word of caution: Peerreview (PR) can be quite bland. Doesn't mean that the entry's bad. Might be advisible to read one or two threds there before submitting your first entry. ) They will most certainly tell you what they perceive as missed out on.
Also, you can delete your unwanted entries. There's a delete-button on the page where you edit the entry.

TTFN
Tube

Thanks for the info about the delete button! I have submitted the History of Medicine entry for Peer Review.

Be seeing you there....

Hi Liz,

Really enjoyed your history of medicine piece (found it over on the peer review page). My MSc was Science Communication - and we covered quite a bit of History of Medicine - so it was really interesting to read.

At the moment I'm working on building communities for schools (here at the beeb). I really like the idea of students building a library of work related to the courses they are studying - and critiquing eachother to improve the quality of the body of work, and found it really interesting that your guide entry came off the back of your history revision. There are a couple of things I've been thinking about that it would be great to get your opinion on though...

1) Do you think many people would want to post and share the work they've done? Why did you (if you don't mind me asking )?

2) Do you think the peer review thing would work if most of the reviewers were people studying the same subject as you, at the same level?

3) You've obviously put heaps of time in - both to writing the piece and ammending it. Has that been a problem / would it stop you doing it often?

4) How did you feel getting such detailed feedback on your work?

Sorry to bombard you with questions... will understand completely if you don't feel like / don't have time to answer them.

Hope the exams went (are going?) well,

Ellie

I don't mind answering at all!
1) Well, I wrote my article for three reasons - because I found the subject interesting, because I knew so much info and I wanted to record what I knew before I forgot it, and because I wanted to write an article for H2G2 which might be included in the edited guide and realised that I was only likely to ever get round to finding enough information if I had studied it at school (to learn all that I spent about 3 hrs a week for about 6 months!).

I should imagine that some other people would be prepared to shere the work, but probably not just anywhere. H2G2 is quite an exclusive thing where it is difficult for people to get edited entries so that gives a motivation to manage to do it!

2) I think the peer review might well work better if everybody had been studying the same thing at the same level because there would be fewer misunderstandings. However, there would be the problem that people who had heard the stuff before might be less likely to be really interested or even that all the ideas for articles would be used up.

3) I actually only spent yesterday and this morning on the article and it was quite easy since all the information is fresh in my memory. The only reason that I have had this time though is that I'm on holiday (after finishing exams!) and the weather is so bad that it is impossible to be out of the house.

I certainly wouldn't be able to do it often - and never during term time (I spend enough time on school work as it is). I guess it has to just be an occassional thing and is a lot easier if you have been spending the past year learning the subject because then all you do is to sit down and type away!

4) The detailed feed back wasn't really a problem, though it was a surprise! What was a bit scary was the conflicting views and the fact that I couldn't satisfy everybody, but it was all useful information and I'm sure the article is better for it!

Thanks - that's really useful. I guess not being able to satisfy everybody is something that pretty much happens a lot of the time no matter what you're doing... So a bit more practice in getting used to it when trying to get an edited entry can't be too much of a bad thing . The 'exclusivity' point is interesting. Would you still have written the entry if there wasn't an 'edited guide' to aim for? I might come and bug you again if I think up some more questions...

I think I would have done, but probably not nearly such a good one!

Oh yes, another point:
If you were doing something for schools you'd really have to have some sort of tiering strategy so that everybody could contirbute. Otherwise, all the entries accepted might be by the A grade students and the lower tier students would get little chance to contribute and also might find complicated A-grade articles difficult to read.

Also the BBC has this nasty little habit of insisting on checking school students' posts before they are put up (yeah, I know why its done!) which would spoil the PR section because feedback would come much less quickly.

LOL at the 'nasty little habit'

Indeed. no chance of ditching the pre-moderation in schools I'm afraid... But yes, it is a shame to insert the delay. Thanks for the tiering point - at the moment one of the things we are considering is having multiple submissions on each subject - and hopefully some kind of voting system that lets people say how useful they've found each piece. Cheers for your help

Sounds great! Especially the voting system, 'coz that gives people an incentive to make their entry good.