by C.V.Rajan

Created on: April 12, 2009   Last Updated: April 28, 2009

Before you think of leapfrogging your article, you should really know how people rate leapfrogged articles at Helium.

Your intention of leapfrogging an article may arise on account of the following considerations:

1) There are typos, grammatical mistakes, formatting issues etc., which you want to rectify so that your otherwise-good-enough-article looks spic and span.

2) You feel your article is quite good, but you notice some substandard articles are undeservedly occupying ranks much above yours and you want to re-initiate a fresh rating cycle to the topic so that your article gets a chance to get read and possibly rated better in the bargain. So, you tweak your article a little here and there, set right a few typos, add or remove some sentences for embellishment and then submit it for leapfrog.

3) You are unhappy with your article contents and also its rank and you want to rework it to improve its quality and also hope for improving its ranks as a consequence

4) You have found some factual mistakes or some mis-information that you had inadvertently written that you want to correct or you have some additional points / updates to make the topic current.

Of the four points listed above, the first two involve very few changes to your article. When you submit your leapfrog, your raters, in all probability, will hit "same" button and your leapfrog gets through. By the way, if you are not aware of this, please be informed that "same" option replaces the new version over the older version, and it is precisely beneficial to the author.

But the warning "look before you leapfrog" really applies to cases coming under points 3 and 4 above!

Very unfortunately (till the time of my writing this article in April 2009), Helium has been very adamantly sticking to its stand, despite innumerable pleas in the discussion forums, of not revealing to the rater which one of the articles (on the left or on the right) is the leapfrogged one.

So, in reality, when the rater reads the two articles (old and new), he / she applies his/ her own judgment as to which one is better. If the changes are very clear, lucid enough and obvious enough, then there are better chances of the leapfrogged article getting accepted.

But unfortunately it does not happen always. I once leapfrogged an article to make it shorter and sleeker by removing the starting paragraph, which looked too much first-person oriented. (You know that Helium prefers more of magazine type articles with less of first person point of writing). However, my leapfrog got rejected a couple of times, perhaps because the raters thought that I had "really added the first-person-oriented-first-paragraph" to make it more true-to-life and authentic!

I have also seen cases contrary to the above. When I expand an article by adding a couple of paragraphs with more of additional information, it gets rejected in the leapfrog! The raters perhaps think the shorter one was sweeter!

So, whether you like it or not, some amount of frustration on account of rejected leapfrogs cannot be ruled out in Helium, when you do some serious rework on your article. Until Helium considers it a serious issue and initiates some corrective action either by identifying which one is the leapfrogged article in the pair or by direct acceptance of a leapfrogged article (with suitable checks and balances to ensure article's integrity), this headache will continue in Helium.

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