The Spirit of the Guide
Created | Updated Mar 4, 2003
But that's not like the original guide...
A cry I hear1 an awful lot of the time. New users join the guide, write a witty piece based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, only to hear that it'll never be edited, because it doesn't follow the Writing Guidelines.
This tends to surprise people. Unfortunately, it often makes them cross, too. After all, in the radio series, the television series, and - of course - the books, the original guide:
Has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate
The problem is that this isn't the original guide. The original guide was a creation of Douglas Adams, in a fictional work. This guide is also a creation of Douglas Adams, and is real. Douglas' Vision for
h2g2 talked about an ever-evolving guide to the real world, the cafes, the places...everything you can think of.
To make this achievable there need to be standards. Fiction won't get edited, and nor will badly researched pieces. After all, if you're looking up the London Underground do you really want a short story? That doesn't mean you can't write short stories - it just means they won't be edited. Most Guide articles and stories don't get edited. This article certainly won't be - it's not related to the real world, outside h2g2. That doesn't mean an entry isn't worthwhile. It just means the entry will never be part of the Encyclopedic Part of the Guide.
Boorrriiinnnngggg
No. Rules don't have to make the guide boring. If you can't write something interesting while keeping to the rules then you'll probably benefit from the practice you'll get trying.
Just because you have to keep to facts doesn't mean you can't be funny, or bizarre. Take a look at this bunch of entries:
Even if those particular articles aren't to your own taste, they do at least show that humour is allowed. In fact, it's welcomed. But it has to be based in reality, please.
Okayyyy....
Don't want to write humour? That's fine, but there's still plenty you can write without breaking the rules. Is there an issue close to your heart? Are you an authority on the Lesser-spotted Mongoose? What about your home town2?
The first thing to do once you've decided on a title is to check that the entry doesn't already exist. Just type the name into the search engine, and see if it comes up with an edited result. If it does, you may need to rethink.
For example, yours truly wanted to write an article on tigers. However, there was already a article in the Guide. So I tried a different approach, and wrote about A730874. The article was accepted and we all lived happily ever after. Except for the tigers, who are still in danger.
A step-by-step guide
- Read the Guidelines
- Think up a topic
- Check in the Search Engine that the article hasn't already been written by someone else
- Write the article3
- When you feel you've done all you can to it, submit it to Peer Review. You do this by clicking the 'Submit for Review" button on the right of the article you want to submit
- Take notice of comments in Peer Review. People are trying to help, after all
- Wait to see if your article gets recommended for inclusion into the edited Guide. I warn you - you must be patient. This will usually take several weeks
