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

I'm not going to make a fuss about losing the references, given that they'll remain in the unedited version for anyone who might benefit from them; still, I'd sooner hear about reasons than about sheer numbers. Is this a judgment about aesthetics? Are references just reckoned to be superfluous to the requirements of most readers? Has anyone had trouble scanning the Entry with them in? Etc. Not that I expect you to spend ages putting together a defence of reference removal when you could be doing other things; but you gave me a reason, and so I've given my reaction.

RJFS, I'm also not going to make a fuss... Taking the references out is more work than leaving them in. But, given that this is the Edited Guide and not a thesis paper, do you really think that anybody uses the references to look something up in the report? Probably not, I would think.

I don't even know whether anybody is that likely to look up info on the Committee and read the Entry; I just know that I ended up researching the Committee, I discovered that Googling produced very little and so I wrote this Entry to get some information onto the Web. On the grounds that someone _may_ want to look at the report itself and _may_ not want to search through it to find out which bits I'm referring to, I put in references; maybe nobody will ever use them, but since I don't know how people are going to use the Entry I opted to give them the tools for checking the sources and leave it to their judgment whether to use them. Still, as I said there's certain to be at least one version of the Entry that has that information, so if you'd prefer a more svelte version, fair enough.

OK, then, see ya on the front page!