Like many other dot-com companies, Adams' company TDV ran into financial difficulties around the turn of the century and eventually ceased operations. In February 2001, the management of the site was taken over by the BBC's BBCi network. During this takeover there was a lengthy intermission which the community called "Rupert" - an obscure reference from one of Adams' books.
h2g2 has a strong community feel, with a largely helpful user base. The site is rich in graphics, which are designed by an in-house team of artists. The site is generally considered quite user-friendly, particularly towards newbies who are usually welcomed by volunteers known as ACEs (see below). Like all communities, discussion ranges from the friendly to the less friendly, but for the most part Researchers work together well.
Articles typically aim for a slightly humorous and idiosyncratic, but correct and well-written treatment of their subject matter. Every article has an associated discussion area, which allows for multiple threads, called Conversations.
In order to contribute to the site, it is necessary to register and to agree to the h2g2 "House Rules" and the general BBC Terms and Conditions. Registered users are called Researchers. Researchers retain the copyright to their articles, but grant the BBC a non-exclusive license to do pretty much whatever they like with them.
The House Rules prohibit various things, including racism, "hard-core" swearing, spamming, languages other than English, and "otherwise objectionable" material. The Terms and Conditions are more legalistic, and prohibit material that is not the submitters own and original work, defamatory material, etc. At one stage they even prohibited viewing BBCi on more than one CPU [sic] at a time, though this section has now been removed.
When the site became part of BBCi, the BBC insisted on moderating all contributions to the site soon after they were made. However, they were eventually persuaded that the h2g2 Community could be trusted to a system of "Reactive Moderation", in which posts are not checked by moderators unless a complaint is made. Individual user accounts are sometimes put on "pre-moderation", meaning that any posts they make are not displayed until they have been reviewed by a moderator.
Occasionally, there has been an issue that is particularly contentious, or that makes the BBC's libel lawyers particularly nervous, and discussion of this issue may be moderated differently. For example:
h2g2 is really two separate but complementary Guides, one Edited and one Unedited. The Unedited Guide is described in a separate section below. The Edited Guide consists of articles (usually called 'Entries') which have passed through a peer review process, and then been checked and tidied up first by a volunteer sub-editor and then, more briefly, by an in-house editor. As of September 12th, 2003, the Edited Guide consisted of 5832 Entries. From September 22nd, 2003, new entries will be added at a rate of at least 10 per week.
On h2g2, entries are peer reviewed by any members of the community who feel like spending a little time reading and commenting. Some of these may be specialists on the topic, but generally most are not. Therefore it becomes obvious whether the average Researcher can understand an Entry, but does mean that mistakes can slip into the Edited Guide.
Once an entry has been picked by a Scout (see later) and leaves Peer Review, it can no longer be modified or updated by its author. However, the author can still update the unedited version, which remains in the wider unedited guide.
Sub-editors, likewise, are not generally experts on the material they are editing, which is assigned on a more or less random basis. Sub-editing is mainly limited to ensuring readability and conformance to the h2g2 house style, though the amount of changes made varies from one Entry to another.
Some sub-editors tend to discuss changes with the Researcher who wrote the Entry to make sure that they are correct in their information and written in the right way. However, this is entirely at the individual sub-editor's discretion. h2g2 lacks an effective change control system, and this often leads to errors creeping in at this stage.
The in-house editors make few changes - the most visible of which is appending a "Related BBC links" section to entries that includes a link for readers to search BBCi for other entries on the same subject.
After many years of discussion, h2g2 has now adopted a formal update system. This consists of an Update Forum, which works in the same way as Peer Review, allowing a new version of an existing entry to be submitted for full review. For small but important edits, the italics can be alerted directly on the appropriate Feedback page.
There are two workshops where help can be obtained in preparing an article for Peer Review. The Collaborative Writing Workshop is where people can collaborate to create an entry. At the Writing Workshop, entries that are not yet ready for Peer Review can be improved. Another review forum, the Flea Market, is where abandoned Entries that fall outside the writing guidelines and have been left in Peer Review are moved, so that other researchers can polish them up for Peer Review.
There is also an Alternative Writing Workshop, where entries that don't adhere to the Writing Guidelines can be worked on.
The Edited Guide forms only a small part of h2g2 as a whole. Most of the site's 'cultural life' takes place in the far larger Unedited Guide, which contains, amongst other things, various clubs and societies, discussion areas, Researchers' h2g2 homepages (known as their 'Personal Space'), and writing workshops. The Unedited Guide can also contain fiction, although this cannot be submitted for inclusion to the Edited Guide, which only contains factual information.
If an article does not make it through the Peer Review process, the original (unedited) entry can still be viewed, as before, in the Unedited Guide. It can, of course, also be rewritten by the author(s) and submitted again at a later date. This is one difference between h2g2 and, say, Nupedia, on which only articles which have been approved by expert peer review can appear.
The UnderGuide is h2g2's most ambitious attempt to bring the attention of the community's best entries that fall outside of the Edited Guide's Guidelines. The UnderGuide and its volunteers have a similar structure to the Edited Guide's volunteers. They have scouts, but call them miners. They have sub editors, but their name is gem polishers. Miners inhabit the Alternative Writing Workshop to comment on entries and pick them for the UG.
The bulk of site activity takes place in United Kingdom (GMT/BST) daytime, which is when the in-house London based team (known as 'The Italics', see below), is there. But at other times, the US, Canadian and Australian researchers are also very active.
The Italics (technically 'the Editors'), the inhouse editors of h2g2, are the only people on the site who get paid (by the BBC) for what they do. They monitor the content of the Edited Guide and oversee the general development of community life. They are named for the way their names appear in conversations, in bold italics, to keep people from impersonating them. There are informal nicknames for the editors such as 'The Powers That Be', 'The Towers', 'The Powers in the Towers' and 'Pisa People'.
The core personnel have changed considerably since h2g2 started in 1999. The original editor, Mark Moxon, left in 2002, and many other Italics have also been replaced.
In September 2003, h2g2 announced plans to reduce the number of BBC staff supporting h2g2 from six to two, a process lasting until the end of the year.
There are five different kinds of volunteer on the site, with varying responsibilities. Any researcher can apply to become a volunteer; if accepted, they gain a badge for their personal space, advertising their status as a member of that particular group:
h2g2 is large enough to have many unofficial clubs and societies, set up and maintained by researchers. Examples include:
The Post is h2g2's own virtual broadsheet newspaper, published weekly by a community member, and featuring articles, interviews and cartoons by h2g2 researchers. It is edited by a few dedicated h2g2 researchers, not paid in-house editors. The Post provides an outlet for comment and for sharing experiences, and often features content that is not intended to form a part of the Edited Guide.
The h2g2 community also investigates its own progress at times, for example in the h2g2 Reports, written by a varied group of Researchers on a relatively infrequent basis.
The engine for h2g2 - and all of its related 'sister' communities in the BBC, such as "360" - is affectionately known as DNA, after the initials of Douglas (Noel) Adams. The DNA technology was introduced a few months after the BBC takeover. Before this technology, there was 'Ripley' which was named after the character from the film Aliens, in homage to the quote "Take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." Before that there was a technology called Llama.
Adams himself was rather involved in the website in its early days. His account name (of course) was DNA, and his user number was 42, a reference to the famous joke in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy that the answer to Life the Universe and Everything is 42. When Adams died, in May 2001, his personal space was the focus for a huge reaction from the community. Tributes and messages poured in at a rate of about one every two minutes.
Adams' legacy is still felt on h2g2, and naturally the site is peppered with references to the Hitchhiker books; it is, however, not a fan site, and was never intended as such.
h2g2 has four different 'skins' which are different ways of viewing the site. Users can set their options menu to view the site in one or other of the skins when they are logged in. Some skins are more popular than others; some even have fanclubs. It is possible to switch between skins while not logged in by altering the URL, for example changing http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A918434 to http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A918434 would alter the skin from Classic Goo to Alabaster.
Terms and Conditions
Additionally, several Entries have been deleted by the h2g2 Editors, at the behest of the BBC's "Editorial Policy" unit, headed by Stephen Wittle.Editing Process
Peer Review
Sub-Editing
Updating
The Workshops
The Unedited Guide
The UnderGuide
The Community
The Italics
Volunteers
University Field Researchers wrote groups of entries based around a common theme, aiming to provide a comprehensive guide to a specific subject. These projects often became quite involved, and took several months to complete. Once finished, they were usually featured on the h2g2 home page for a week. This scheme was closed on June 25, 2003, though previous Field Researchers retained their badges. [1]Clubs and Societies
The Post
DNA
The Skins
See Also
External Links