This is a daylog in two parts.
I was feeling a bit restless last night, so I went to my noder closet and dug through last week's drycleaning. I pulled my TDS uniform out of the plastic baggie, draped the tunic over my shoulders and sat by the keyboard. There was work to do.
Not content to randomly wander through the nodegel correcting errors hither and to (like some kind of E2 Grammar Nazi Littlest Hobo), I've taken to using Google's "Advanced Search" option to spellcheck large swathes of the database at a time. It's a bit disturbing, as nearly every possible misspelling pops up somewhere in the nodegel: trully - 4 instances, poeple - 2 instances, beleive - 30 instances, thier - 134 instances, corect - 2 instances... The most disconcerting thing about the whole process is the knowledge that Google has only a fraction of E2's nodes indexed at any given time, meaning that more of these errors lurk beyond my sight.
Last night's victim was "wich," which popped up in about 60 writeups. Most of the corrections were blabbed to their authors, but some required the help of an editor. I dropped off a request at Broken Nodes and went to bed. As this request had a bit of... er, heft to it, compounded with the fact that many of the editors are preoccupied with the new Copyright Compliance policy (gee, someone should write a daylog entry about that!), I expected it to take several days to weed out all of the errors. Then it dawned on me: If the request isn't nuked before 7 p.m. CDT (0000 server time), then...
You have 1 C! and 30 votes left today.
Cracka's got tha C-bomb, bi-otch!
So I did the only thing that a Ritalin-deprived kid tethered to the monkey bars would do when given a Hershey bar... I cooled Ralph.
In his editor log for the month, Jurph advocates a personal policy of Zero Population Growth. This doesn't mean that he's going to limit himself to a solitary child, just that he's only going to compose (at maximum) a number of new writeups equal to the number of subpar ones he deletes in the course of his regular editorial duty.
I find this plan curious, as some editors are urging their brethren to node more, while others (like Jurph and Ouroboros) are placing a moratorium on their own noding activities. Both strategies have the same goal: to increase the ratio of quality writeups to "below the bar" ones. It's just that one method seeks to achieve the goal through addition, while the other though deletion.
"But why mention this, Gord?" Well, it's just that E2 has been in a state of ZPG for at least a year:
Everything2 Statistics as of 2002-08-31 03:48:10 (from the earliest Everything Daily Report in my possession):
Writeups total: 480,102
From the Statistics Nodelet, 2003-08-21:
Writeups: 466,939
Granted, 2.7 per cent isn't a drastic figure, especially when calculated over the course of a year. Most of the writeups that were nuked were at best regrettable, and they won't be missed. (And of the 13k writeups that have vanished, almost a quarter of those were the autonoded Magic: The Gathering writeups, which died a rapid and silent death last December.) And despite the best efforts of the Copyright Salvage Team, many of the lyrics and poetry nodes will be disappearing sooner rather than later. At this rate, E2's negative growth may continue for several months.
So Jurph (and Ouroboros, too), please keep writing. Pretend that E2's the Roman Catholic Church and the Bubonic Plague is ravaging Christendom. We need your babies!