This article is classified "Real"
If you ever find an idea for a Project Galactic Guide article inside your brain, here's some solutions on what to do with it. First and foremost, you should write an article about it. This is the whole purpose of The Guide. Fill the net to the edge with PGG articles. But the case could be that for some reason or other you find it difficult to write an article on your idea. It could be that you have too many ideas to work out by yourself, or you could have an idea but no inspiration, or little further ideas, to make a whole article out of it. In this case you might want someone else to profit from this wonderful idea, or just don't want it to get lost because it's so brilliant. Then you can submit it to the Ideabank(tm). The Ideabank(tm) is a bunch of files stored at The PGG Mothership (ftp://vela.acs.oakland.edu/pub/galactic-guide/ideas). The bunch of files contain a large amount of article ideas and concepts, for Field Researchers to use. The Ideabank is maintained by our very own Article Idea Manager (AIM), who is currently Mark Seaborn, and can be reached via ideabank@megadodo.com (and failing that, mseaborn@bigfoot.com). The procedure is to send an idea you have to him and/or to alt.galactic-guide (so everyone is aware of what ideas there are and can comment on them). Make sure you've put your idea in the same format as in the PGG articles. You can read more about this in the Article Writing Guide For Field Researchers And Guide Editors. Include as much token-types (%t, %s, %i, %x) as you want. This means that you can submit any combination of titles, summaries, subtitles, cross-references, and/or article bits, except the zero solution (nothing isn't an idea.) If you feel the need to, you can also include a credit token, %c, in which you can put your name, the name of the inventor of the idea, and your email address. Next send the idea, with in the subject line: "IDEA: <your idea title>", to the AIM and/or the newsgroup (as I said). If you should ever want to add various types of background information or other ideas about a submitted idea to the idea, just mail your message to the AIM and/or the discussion group. Contributions are greatly appreciated and add to the creative activities within The Project. The Ideabank is useless without users. If you, a Field Researcher, are void of ideas, or see an idea that appeals to you, why not take an idea out of the Ideabank and make it into an article? The procedure here is to contact the AIM that you're going to write it, and he will put a new token in the idea, %b <author>,<date>, to indicate that you're busy on it, and started being so at a certain date. This token doesn't mean that other Field Researchers can't write anything on that topic, but that he/she should be aware that someone else may have the same idea about it. It is then wise to contact that person, to make sure you have different viewpoints, or to combine your efforts! It is greatly appreciated if you put the credit token into your article. You can use anything that is mentioned in the idea in the article, but this is absolutely not obligatory. You have complete freedom to disregard possible already written paragraphs if you think that would be better. After an article has officially been put into the archives, the idea that started it, and which contents have completely been processed into the article, must be deleted. The author of that article should send an E-mail to the PGGAIM to tell him the title of the Idea that has to be removed from the archive. It's a bit too much work for him to try to figure out which articles came from the idea-archive. Articles written after that, based upon the same idea, are then considered to be follow-ups on that article and are treated the same way. Finally I want to give a warning. Remember that submitting ideas is fine, as long as it doesn't interfere, or even replace, your writing of articles. The more articles the better. We wouldn't want to be held responsible for idea-submit addicts, who lose their jobs or don't graduate because they're totally addicted to submitting as much ideas as possible. (Who? Me?)