Genesis

After Douglas Adams presented his idea about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to the world, it was inevitable that, as with so much science fiction¹, this idea of a (humourous) electronic reference would eventually become reality.
Undoubtably many incarnations must have appeared on home computers, but the first one to step out of the shadows of the creator's geological neighbourhood was Dave Hodges' guide.
His *Real* Hitchhiker's Guide received many entries and print-outs were auctioned for charity at SF conventions.
But this is not his story.

In the early years of the internet, just before it really took off², the alt.fan.douglas-adams newsgroup became the stage for discussions about using the internet to create a Hitchhiker's Guide for everyone.
This guide was briefly called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Known Galaxy, as founding father Paul Clegg prefered it to be about real things.
Reality was however found to be too much of a constraint, and the whole thing was renamed Project Galactic Guide, a name that has remained to this day.

Discussions about the Project moved to the newsgroup alt.galactic-guide.
In the beginning the emphasis was on creating article browsers for about any type of operating system that you could possibly have on your computer at home, but in later years the WWW became increasingly popular, and a presence on the web was developed, currently located at www.galactic-guide.com.

The basic idea of Project Galactic Guide is to have a lot of fun whilst making a humourous electronic encyclopedia.
This fun comes first of all with the discussions about the articles' contents³.
Then you have the discussions between the editors and authors to improve the quality of an article - discussions about the subject matter that the article covers (should more be added?), about the flow of the text, and about the humour.
The final stretch of fun comes with the publication of the article on the internet.
This provides an endless source of joy, because publication leads to both nice and strange comments from readers all around the world... right up until civilisation ceases to exist⁴.

How PGG Works

At this time you're probably interested in finding out how the Project
works.
When you've become inspired to write an article⁵, PGG provides articles which help you to easily format your article⁶ and to check whether the contents are up to the Project's standards.
After you've finished it and asked friends and/or folks in the newsgroup to read it and give comments, you can submit the article by e-mail to [email protected].
It is then distributed to an Editor who is free⁷, who then edits it and engages into a discussion with the author about his edits and comments.
When both are satisfied, the article is sent to the Review Coordinator, who puts it up on the newsgroup to be reviewed by peers - other Field Researchers and anyone else who likes to vent their opinion.
These comments are also used to improve the article to achieve the high quality that we all appreciate.
Now it is archived and published.
There you have it, plenty of opportunity to find out lots of interesting 'facts', laugh a bit, and improve your writing skills!

A bit of History

Over the years the Project has slowly developed into its current form (scetched in the paragraph above), and about 100 articles are added each year.
Slowly we also tried to loosen the bonds to our inspirator and find our own style and humour.
In the beginning, 1991, Paul Clegg and Steve Baker where the main men.
They were the first editors.
After a while Steve became the busiest editor of the two, and he also took care of the archive.
Later Alex McLintock, a prolific writer, joined the editorial team.
When Steve resigned in 1995, Roel van der Meulen, prolific writer and recently instated as editor, took over the job of 'Librarian' and helped set up the review process.
Prolific Aaron Rice became a member of the team even further on, and developed the very handy pggwin tool.
Various other people helped with the inner workings in those times too, but only Editor Mark Seaborn is still here today; he eventually took over a lot of Roel's jobs when he had to devote time to his thesis.
During this time PGG was barely alive, with almost all main characters involved with matters in 'real life'.
An exception was the development of a face for PGG on the web: the megadodo.com website with the latest archive updates and lots more, hosted, developed and maintained by Paul Clegg.
And so PGG remained 'out for lunch' for the most of 1997 and 1998.

Begin 1999 PGG was violently awakened from their coma by the launch of H2G2.
With professional competition on the horizon, everyone ran back to take care of their baby.
A backlog of articles was attacked head-on by the Editors, and construction started on a new website.
This new website would contain a lot of features that we had already been talking about for a long time, such as the IdeaBank, the articles' comments database, etc etc.
Alex McLintock arranged a server, claimed the domain www.galactic-guide.com and started by copying the stuff from megadodo.com.
Slowly but surely, with help of Mark Seaborn and Stéphane Lussier (a bloke who has been involved in PGG graphics and web design since the beginning), an improved site grew, and continues to grow.
That's where we are now: PGG is buzzing with activity, both on the side of web-presence as in the actual article development.

PGG Now

So there you have it: a fun, amateur-writing project with a size which allows a personal touch (limited though still considerable⁸).
It has also been described as:

• A collaborative internet attempt at creating an electronic reference meant to guide and misguide its readers in matters of life, death, and finding a parking space anywhere in the universe.
• An internet experiment that aims to deliver interesting, informative, and humorous articles by letting an infinite amount of Field Researchers type out their random thoughts at a computer keyboard.
• If you can't find it in the Guide, it's probably important!
• PGG: Putting things out of perspective is the most fun way to put things into perspective.
• PGG: The Truth is in There!