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

Yes, very cool; super-sweet.

Hello Lowmankind; hello Peer Reviewers.

I'm GTBacchus, and I'll be your SubEditor this evening. First of all, congratulations on the great entry, and for being picked. I've been given a copy of your entry to work on - you can find it at A869835. I've just been going over it a bit, making sure of spelling, grammar, GuideML, etc, and adding a couple of links.

I've only altered the text in a couple of places - I added a brief explanation of Corrimal in the Celebrity section, and reworded a sentence or two near the end, where I replaced an with another HEADER. Feel free to drop by and see the work I'm doing; if you have any comments, questions, corrections, complaints, or whatever, you can post them here.

It's a very thorough town entry; those are always fun to work on, I find.

One thing about crediting other researchers - in the Edited Guide, just to be consistent, the only kind of crediting we usually do is shared author credit. Would you want for McKay and Ormondroyd to be added to the list of authors? Then it would appear on the front page as written by all three, and edited by me. They say that someday the way authors are credited will be updated, to reflect main author vs other contributors, but that's somewhere on Jim (the progammer)'s to-do list, which is apparently sort of... long.

Anyway, my edits only apply to the copy I'm working on, of course. Your original copy will stay the way it is, unless you decide to change it.

Congratulations again, and thanks for the great entry!




GTB

Hi GTBacchus

I'm fine with all the editorial changes you've made. I did want to point out, though, one very tiny spelling error: the header "The future of the Gong" has "hte" in there. Something tiny, but there it is.

Regarding crediting people, well, this one appears to be difficult. I'm all for the notion of 'credit where credit's due', and in fact get kind of particular about it. However, if the final edited work will be something like 95% my work, I really would prefer to not have two small credits promoted to full authors. It's an ego thing I guess, but there again, it's credit where credit's due. Nothing against McKay and Ormondroyd, but I feel that their helpful contributions warrant a single credit, rather than full author status.

Otherwise, it's all looking great. Thanks for the constructive criticism and feedback

Thanks for catching that typo. I obviously typed that Header and never looked back!

Is Corrimal the northern suburb you mention where AC/DC are supposed to have first played? If so, I'll move the mention up to that paragraph.

Regarding credit, I know what you mean. I'll ask the editors if there's a better way to handle this.



GTB

Incidentally, you might be interested in an old entry on Coledale (A225000) that I found while looking for links. The author seems to be long gone, bit I went ahead and submitted it to Peer Review at F48874?thread=224025. If you know anything about Coledale that should be added to that entry, you're certainly welcome to contribute!

Yeah, that's right, AC/DC did play in Corrimal. It was either the scout hall or the town hall, I can't quite remember. Same goes for Queen, although I'm not entirely sure how reliable that one is.

As for Coledale, well, it's in the far-north Illawarra, and isn't part of the greater city of Wollongong. I don't really know much about Coledale, to tell you the truth -- the most I've ever had to do with the place is watching it go by on the train trip to Sydney.

It appears that there is a little ambiguity arising as to the name 'Wollongong' and its meaning.

According to the Illawarra Mercury -- the local newspaper -- there are several possible meanings for the name. They give the following possibilities:
1. "The sound of the sea". Apparently, the word was originally pronounced "Woll-long-gong", and intended to be onomatopoeic of the sound of the rolling waves. I don't see it personally.
2. "See! The monster comes!" This is apparently an expression of fear and surprise, uttered when the Aborigines saw the first European tall ship in full sail.
3. The original word is "Wollunguh", and it means a place where a marriage took place between the offspring of two great kings. The word also relates to a great feast of fish at the wedding.

Other meanings include "hard ground", "near water", "sound of the waves" or "many snakes". This latter is improbable, because a common Aboriginal linguistic trait is that they say the word twice to denote plural (meaning "many").

It seems the jury's out as to the real meaning. The first example given (sound of the ocean) seems unlikely, because I can't make it sound the way it's supposed to.
The second example strikes me as absurd. The Aborigines were a peaceful people, and more than likely they would be more curious than frightened. On the other hand, this meaning could be applied in hindsight, which would then make it viable.
The third explanation sounds plausible, inasmuch as it can't be disproved. However, it is closest to the one I have uncovered ("wollonguyah"), so I am assuming that one of the two must be the most correct.
My suspicion is that there will never be a clear answer. There will be different recollections no matter where you go.

I don't know if this ought to be reflected in the article or not. My source on Wollongong's name is quite reliable -- he's an extremely intelligent scholar who has studied journalism, and invested a lot of time into Wollongong's history, and that of the Illawarra region.

Well, just so everyone is aware, anyway. I think your opinion at this point would be appreciated.

keeponrockin
Tom

Hmmm.... sounds like at least a footnote is called for, to the effect that other interpretations are around, and that nobody's really sure. I have a look, and then let you know when I've made a change.

Actually, I reworked the paragraph... whaddya think?

Your reworked paragraph works fine.

For the record, the version of the name about the wedding is spurious, as it was obtained from a local in one of the least reputable suburbs of Wollongong.

This is conjecture, but I can picture it as being a tall tale told in a pub to wind up the reporter (reminiscent of the so-called "grunge" lingo obtained from Seattle by the New York Times, back in the early 90s). Of course, I have no way of validating this suspicion, so I think it deserves its place in the guide entry until conclusively proven otherwise.

Ok, that's all right then. We should be all done now; just one more thing I wanted to tell you about. I took out the footnotes crediting McKay and Ormy for their contributions, and asked the editors about ways to give credit without giving shared author credit, which is admittedly misleading at times.

The best we came up with is this. You go to the entry, click 'Discuss This Entry', and create a conversation thread called something like 'The author would like to thank', or whatever. That way it'll be attached to the entry when it hits the front page and forevermore, and you'll retain full author credit.

Sound ok? I'm going to go ahead and send my subbed copy back to the Towers now. If you have any questions, or if anything else comes up, just let me know!


GTB

That sounds fine with me. I'll go and do that now.