h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Even if it was written pretty long ago - this is in my opinion ridiculous and does not even take the basic historic facts into account. How on earth (where else..) could this remain that long in the Edited Giude???

It's one of those things that happens sometimes - most often with entries such as this one that discuss a subject that not many people know very much about... a comparable entry on somewhere in Europe or the USA, for example, would have raised much more of an outcry because far more researchers know about those places.

Although looking down the conversation list, a few people have had the same concerns as yourself. The thing is that once an entry is published on the front page, after the first week or so the BBC staff don't get time to keep a check on everything (there used to be five full-time staff, now we're down to one and the volunteers help out as much as they can) so unless they happen to be subscribed to the entry, if no-one went directly to tell them, then they won't have known about the problems with the entry.

Another factor is that until recently, it hasn't been easy to update an entry once it's been published in the Edited Guide - hopefully, the invention of the UpdateForum will change that.