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

Entry: The Williams Committee - A4225114
Author: RFJS__ - hiding behind the waterfall. - U524615

Jimster thought ( F150575?thread=860969&post=16100630#p16100630 ) this should come down here, and so it does, even though I don't usually wander through anymore. I wrote it a while ago when I was advised to read the Committee's report as part of dissertation research, and discovered that Googlinf produced very little about it.

I'm not sure whether the level of referencing is suited to an EG Entry; it adds a lot of brief parentheses, but for someone needing to check the primary sources it should be useful.

'Googlinf' should be 'Googling', of course.

Considering some committee members were upset by the low intellectual quality of some of the attacks - I'm surprised they didn't consider that intelligence may be the reason that none of them were driven to depravity - or age - or opportunity - or even moral turpitude.

Sorry - that's just a comment.

I think you should bung in a footnote translating honi soit qui mal y pense - and on a personal note I'd lose the page refs - or make then footnotes - to improve the readability.

Its an interesting topic really - and one which has effects even today.

That would produce more footnotes than even I'd be happy with (and I like footnotes).

Regarding the motto, I'm not sure a translation alone gives a full idea of why it's so ironic; are you sure the linkage isn't adequate?

It is for me (and I know what you mean)- but not everyone can follow hyer-links.

Meaning h2g2 Mobile users?

I've had another look at it, and the more I look at it the more I think that if you don't already know the story about the Countess of Salisbury a translation isn't going to be adequate. I can put in a full explanatory footnote, but it's perhaps a touch excessive to do that in order to explain a passing comment when only h2g2 Mobile users can't follow the link provided.

You should never make a comment in a h2g2 entry that has to be explained by following a link to an external site and then reading through a rather badly explained article to find the explanation about half way down. I think a rather long footnote is needed.

The title is a bit dull. This is an interesting entry, but I wouldn't read it based on the current title. I suggest:

Censorship, Pornography and the Williams Committee

Footnote added. Regarding the title, I suggest that the difficulty is that it doesn't show what the Committee did; your complaint, however, seems to be that it isn't salacious enough. I don't like the word 'pornography' in that context because although in effect that was what the Committee largely dealt with its remit was concerned with 'obscenity', so I'm putting that in instead.

Salacious but accurate is what we're aiming for. We want people to read these entries.

I wonder would this benefit from a succinct overview at the start? It could saying what the william committee was, what country we are talking about and what happened as a result of it

I think the following sentence is just too long:

"Since unified, nationwide pronouncements on what films people could see without being corrupted were subsequently needed (since it looked just too ridiculous when adjacent local authorities came to different conclusions about obscenity, and a film that was banned as a source of vice and corruption in one area was legal a mere bus ride away), the British Board of Film Censors (now the British Board of Film Classification) had achieved a sort of quasi-official status in the 1920s."

This could be broken up into two or even three sentences to make it more manageable.


Some House Style points:

Footnotes should come before the full stop at the end of a sentence, so instead of .text we should have text.

Dr. Anthony Storr --> Dr Anthony Storr


Typos:

thirty-five times from from --> thirty-five times from

I had some trouble with 'what happened as a result of it', given that the report was buried ('killed' in Simpson's language), so I came up with:

'The story of a committee of thirteen people who scrutinised UK censorship law, and the nothing that was done as a result.'

Any good?

I don't think LDers can follow links either - I certainly see people asking for details from a link often enough to assume its something that effects a reasonable ammount of people.

I guess I also didn't want to sound elitist - I assume there are lots of people who don't know what the motto means - or who it relates to - but who would see the irony of the translation alone (given what happened to the report.)

This purely to explain my thinking - nothing else.

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Well done

Hi RJFS,

I'm currently subbing your fine entry at A8239142, and I hope you'll have a look. How about getting rid of the references in brackets; the consensus (and that's also my opinion) that the entry would be better off without them...

SchrEck Inc.