h2g2 has an excellent community feel, with a largely helpful user base.
There are volunteers, in rough multiples of 42, who go around welcoming newbies, helping out bemused people with tech problems, hunting for and editing Guide Entries, written by the site's many thousands of Researchers, and hoping to be included in the Edited Guide, which has over 3000 entries and is expanding at the rate of 25 a week. h2g2 is rich in graphics and is hugely user-friendly.
The volunteers are split into five distinct groups, although multiple badges (these appear on your Personal Space) can be held at once. Any Researcher can apply for a badge, but usually only those with a fair amount of experience will be accepted.
The Aces are responsible for welcoming new users, and assisting them in becoming active and experienced members of h2g2. While no statistics are publicly available, it is noted that this approach provides a more-than-respectable proportion of initially active Researchers staying on. For help later on in a Researcher's time, Gurus are there to help out.
The next two groups are linked. Guide Entries wishing to become 'Edited' (part of an official collection, the Edited Guide), must go through a process called 'Peer Review'. An URL and Title are posted to a specific page, and the article is reviewed, and constructively criticised by all and sundry. After a minimum of a week, or more if required, a Scout may pick the Entry for inclusion, and each Scout has a few picks each month. The Italics then read the article, and if they think it's a reasonable pick, then it's sent out to a Sub-Editor for correction, checking and re-formatting. The Sub returns the Entry, and it's checked. After a while it's posted to the Front Page for a day, and one in five is awarded it's own professionally drawn picture.
The fifth group are 'University Field Researchers', who write groups of entries that are completed roughly once a week. These groups of entries are a complete guide to a fairly wide subject, and can be very entertaining.
h2g2 is large enough to have many different unofficial usergroups as well. There's the Musicians' Guild, the Zaphodistas, the Society for the Addition of a Towel Smiley, the Thingites (who want 'Thursday' renamed 'Thing'), and the 'Small but Vocal Minority', to name but a few. It also has its own virtual broadsheet newspaper, The h2g2 Post, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/ThePost, covering all things h2g2.
h2g2 even investigates itself, for example in the h2g2 Reports, written by a large group of Researchers.
One interesting point about h2g2 is that there isn't really a user hierarchy on-site. From the day you sign up, you can do anything on-site, post to Peer Review, etc. This is a contrast to sites like everything2.com, where all features are accessible only after a certain number of write-ups. While volunteers are respected by others and by the Italics, they'll take good advice from anyone (well, almost anyone).
The community is large enough to have people skilled in most things, and to have thriving user sub-groups after things like new smileys (emoticon images) - the site already has more than 150, from alien to yikes!
It's worth noting that the bulk of site activity takes place in UK (GMT/BST) daytime, and that's when the in-house team (London-based) are there. Outside of this time, though, the US and Australian Researchers hold the fort pretty well.
The h2g2 in-house team (the italics) are reasonable easily accessible to all users on-site, and even more so to volunteers by email groups. One thing that has beenn seen to limit h2g2 is moderation. As part of the BBC, all conversations are moderated by people with otherwise no connection to the site - and sometimes mistakes are inevitably made. This aside, the site functions fairly well. It's now at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2, although the old link still redirects. See HHGG
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