by C.V.Rajan

Created on: April 20, 2009

If some of the Helium discussion board postings (as I write this in April 09) are any indication, it looks the question "How to get your leapfrog approved in Helium" is not an easy one to answer.

You essentially resort to leapfrogging your Helium article under the following conditions:

1) You have noticed several typos (which far outnumber 3 or 4 that you can get corrected by requesting a typo correction to

content@Helium.com in your article.

2) You find some grammatical mistakes and some other simple, not too glaring mistakes (like poor formatting or a few poor punctuation marks) that you failed to notice earlier; you want to set them right, so that your article looks truly professional.

3) You have some genuine mistakes in your article; you have some added information that can improve your article's content and worth; you want to embellish your article with more powerful and attractive statements that will enthuse the reader the article "fully". So, you go ahead and do a leapfrog, irrespective of its current rank.

4) You do some or all of above to improve the rank of your article which is found tanking.

After you submit your leapfrog, what happens at Helium?

Your leapfrogged article is presented to a minimum of 3 raters along with your old article for comparison and judgment to decide which one is better or whether they are "almost same". Unfortunately, at the time of my writing this article, Helium does not provide any identification as to which is the old version and which is the leapfrogged version to the rater.

If at least two of the three raters click "same" button or if they choose the improved version to be the better one, the leapfrogged article gets through and it replaces the older one. Here comes the subjectivity, keenness of rating or callousness of a rater into the picture.

There are broadly 3 types of raters:

1) Those Who Know Clearly How a Leapfrog Works:

They glance at top of the screen to know that it is a leapfrog that they are rating and they are aware of the existence of the "same" button for use in this case. They also know that hitting the "same" button will pave the way for the acceptance of the leapfrogged version. As long as there is no nonsense found in the two comparative articles, they know there is really no need to read through the entire article and sit in judgment. They know the author knows better why he/ she leapfrogged. They hit the "same" button and proceed to the next rating.

If your leapfrogged article is rated by such persons, you

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