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

http://www.h2g2.com/A467291

This is my entry about the Aardvark. There are already lots of unedited entries on Aardvarks here in h2g2 but they are all utterly rudimentary - two or three lines of text, and I don't think they're meant seriously. This is a serious entry. Only I have one problem - the entry is written in GuideML and displays correctly when I preview it, but it insists on being HTML when I add it - no matter what I do it refuses to go into GuideML. I mean, after keeping me busy for half an hour fixing GuideML errors it ought to at least have the decency to display it in GuideML after I debugged it. What's going on??!! Can someone help me please??!! Aside from that, what do you think about the entry?

In case you want to look at some of the other entries for comparison, here they are:

http://www.h2g2.com/A67240
http://www.h2g2.com/A304949
http://www.h2g2.com/A13780
http://www.h2g2.com/A41608
http://www.h2g2.com/A130294
http://www.h2g2.com/A93151
http://www.h2g2.com/A238321


Any suggestions will be wonderful.

Thanks,
Case

I only needed to try a bit harder! It's allright now! What do you think? I bet there's a lot you didn't know!

gosh. comprehensive.

So comprehensive, for a first submit PR that I suspect plagiarism, I'm afraid - this is all your own work? If so, congratulations!

A little bit of humour might be nice. EG: "Also they sometimes bury into dam walls, causing them to weaken and occasionally give way." - it might be worth pointing out the likely effect of this on the aardvark... It's just a little dry as it is.

Similarly, you might want to break up some of the swathes of text - more paragraphs, italics and bold, bulleted list, diagrams - whatever it takes. EG, 'feeding' might be broken into subsubheaders on termites and ants (to do subsubheaders, just do subsub</P&gt.

Sure it's my own work - I did reference lots of books, the facts are the same but the wording is mine, and there's a lot of my own personal experience in it as well. About the text - I'll wait and see what others have to say about it. I have a huge monitor and on it not one of the paragraphs are more than a few lines long so it looks quite short and concise!

Why does you article stay in HTML? Have you tried the really obvious one, click on the "Change Style" button?

If you select GuideML and Preview, it will show you it in GuideML form, but it won't actually change the original unless you click on Change Style before Updating.

This really confused me too.

Don't try and add humour to your article. If you don't write in a naturally funny way, you won't be able to make it sound good. It will only sound contrived. Just write it the way you normally write.

You will have to remove any references to "I", "me" and "my". The policy is that articles should be written in the impersonal "third person". You can still tell the story supplied by your father, but you'll have to describe it as "one observer relates that ..." or something like that.

You say "here are some true ones" and go on to relate your father's story. You then say, "The next piece of info comes from a (perhaps) more authoritative source". This suggests that your father's story is not true. If it is true, there is no need for the comment about the (perhaps) more authorative source.

In "reproduction", the sentence about disturbing the aardvarks just before they mated is out of place. Perhaps you should say: No-one has ever observed aardvarks mating. The nearest anyone has got is when a pair of adult animals were surprised apparently just before they mated.

Don't say copulated, say mated.

This is a very good article. I enjoyed reading it. I have seen aardvarks in a zoo in Belgium. They are certainly very strange creatures. I enjoyed finding some more about them.

Advice taken, thanks. The entry IS in GuideML now, no problem!

Anything else, anybody?

Fascinating. I think the aardvark provides its own humour, the image of "a vast, animated cloud of dust and flying clods; when it settles, the Aardvark is gone." is great.

I noticed a couple of typos, dug for digged in "but they digged after it with their spades" and you could change of the "stills" at the beginning of the last paragraph, perhaps to however. Tho' I believe that's not good grammar but I can't think of another word just now.

Great entry Case, is this you starting at A ???
Wz

Mistakes corrected - I also caught another one - thanks. In Afrikaans we have only a single verb form - past, present, future, singular, plural, first, second, third persons - all the same. So I sometimes get confused with the English tenses - but just a bit further I correctly used the word "dug", so there's some hope for me!

What comes after the Aardvark? How about the Binturong? I'll have to do some research ...

Well according to my dictionary, the aardwolf comes next. But as I've never heard of the Binturong that would be great!
Wz.

'Case!
We must stop meeting like this! Ungulates are no reason to hide our light under a bushel..! This is another wonderful piece, although I do agree with Lucinda about breaking up some of the paragraphs...perhaps a sub-heading or two would do the trick? But I confess to having a weakness for Entries about distant relations!
TheOkapi

Sorry Okapi, beat you to it....Guess what.....

We think the entry is great, and it has been reconmended, soon this thread will vanish from the peer review page to re-appear on the entry itself. Your page will appear briefly on the "What's coming up page" and it will be tagged as reconmended. Later, maybe sometime later, it will be edited and will appear as a fully edited part of the guide.

I was drawn to it because I use a software package called AARDVARK (Analyse Any Relevant Data, Visually Aquiring Real Knowledge), but hey I learnt something.

C Hawke - Scout

Thanks everybody. If you wanna know what an Aardvark looks like, check out:

http://www.h2g2.com/A477902

Editorial Note: This thread has been moved out of the Peer Review forum because this entry has now been recommended for the Edited Guide.

If they haven't been along already, the Scout who recommended your entry will post here soon, to let you know what happens next. Meanwhile you can find out what will happen to your entry here: http://www.h2g2.com/SubEditors-Process

Congratulations!