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

I've been on h2g2 a fair while now. And I have to say, I'm afraid it might be on the final slope.

So, contribute! Write those Entries for the EG! Whoever you are, whatever you do, they don't have to be long tomes, they don't have to be serious, they don't have to be about science!

I've tried my best lately and have written 3 new entries on Australian animals. They're brief, they're not full of facts, but they have a feeling of knowing the subject and human interest in them. That's what the Guide needs, especially the EG. Human interest, not facts and figures we can find out there in w*k* and Encarta.

Write about what you know! Tell it from your experiences!

Geographical Entries used to be the bread and butter of the EG. Write about the pub you go to most, the cafe in town, the place you buy your groceries and why you love it so much. Write about the places you used to play at when you were young. Write about those little known places or sites of interst that you think other people might appreciate.

Or tell us how to do something! Sure I know what a corset is, but I sure as heck don't know how to do one up, or undo one!

What is your passion? Write about that!

Do something, the Edited Guide and h2g2 may be on the brink of fading away into the shadow of other reference materials on the Internet, we need to do something to make it stand out once again. Get Behind Your Guide!

I think I might start a journal entry about this too, maybe reach a few people who aren't on yours/Alex's friends lists or subscribed to the PR forum.

I am a trifle worried. We seem to be losing some of the old cohort and not replacing them with interested newcomers

Worries me too. If you use the h2g2 specific 'Who's online' it's rare to see over 70 where it was once 200+. Right now it's 56 with only one 'new this week'.

You've got to look at where newcomers might come from. The BBC feature us on a page called 'Talk'! It's not surprising if most new members from that route come here to do just that, and class us with the other message boards found there.

'Talk' isn't a link I'd ever have tried myself. A page headed 'Contribute' or something to do with interactivity I might have. Even 'Discuss' would be better.

There's a few who stumble in from a google search for a subject they're looking for. That I understand was always intended to be the main source of reseacher material. But there's Wiki... and h2g2 's probably not far up on google listings.

(If we were in the BBC search system, that route might work better, but we're not last I heard.)

Then there's those that come from the HitchHiker connection, only to find this is not a HitchHiker fansite (It's a Dr Who one ).

They're not unfixable problems - the fixing's not in our hands though.

You're right there, and a problem will only be fixed if people want to fix it...

I don't think it's as bad as it looks. True, there are the newbies who think this is a message board like others, and there are those who post just one comment on a subject they found here, never to come back again. But there are those, who come here for what reason ever, and who do reply to my welcome message, and I think it's not boasted if i say that at least four of them have written entries and submitted them to PR at some point. I do try to encourage 'my' newbies to write entries.

Well if I am to be claimed then I believe I was Lil's, and that was about a year ago. I have my 8th entry in pr now, and that number should go up to nearly 15 when I finally finish Hitler off (I can't remember how many entries are in there now). What sort of yearsly average should I be aiming at?

Ok. The FP needs three entries per day plus an extra two on Friday. That's 884 entries pa. Divide that by the number of active EG writers. If there's 100, that'd be 8.75 entries pa for each of them.

Or you could estimate 150 (three per week sound reasonable?) entries from one-offs and irregular contributers, leaving 734 from the regulars. With say 50 regular contributers, (I've no idea if that's reasonable or not), that's 14.5 pa each.

Bear in mind that Matt contributes about 150 a week by himself and what does that do to the numbers?

That's true.

11.92, as near as makes no difference to one a month, for the remaining 49 then.

So how many do I have to do then?

Pi.

mmm, pie

There would have to be 185.8181844 regular writers for benjaminpoore's share to be pi...

Waz, I can honestly say, sometimes you really scare me

Are you proud of working that out?

Oh yes. It takes years of training you know, to produce exact figures from a heap of assumption.

Yes but you've clearly got that rare nack of talking authoritatively about something that you have no knowledge of. Have you ever read War and Peace *topical reference* *smug look*.

"Do something, the Edited Guide and h2g2 may be on the brink of fading away into the shadow of other reference materials on the Internet, we need to do something to make it stand out once again. Get Behind Your Guide!"

It needs to get back to its roots. h2g2 should be an online equivalent of a Rough Guide: meticulously researched, opinionated and edgy. It shouldn't shy away from airing strong and possibly highly idiosyncratic opinions. But above all else it needs to be *informative*. I can handle anybody's take on a subjected if (a) it's evident that they know what they're talking about and (b) I fell like I've some away having learned something of use, or something that makes me look at the world in a new way. Song analyses, accounts of video games or blow-by-blow accounts of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer don't meet either of these criteria.

At the risk of being edgey, there has always been a great deal of talk about what H2G2 'should be'. Obviously there is a certain amount of difficulting working towards the dream, as it were, when the original dreamer is no longer with us and therefore in no position to offer his thoughts on how we reconcile the ideas he has had to the reality of implementing them, as he would have done with the film in much the same way. All of this brings me to a fairly fundamental question. Do we need to keep the guide going at it's present rate of contributions? If we accept Felonious Monk's suggestion that the guide should go back to its roots then surely over whelming it with entries is simply diluting it with episode guides to buffy the vampire slayer. Conversely, do we aim not to stop until the guide is an unrivalled guide to everything you might ever want to know about up to and including buffy the vampire slayer?

Hey, Matt. Have a read of this :
A20356931

OK, it doesn't belong in the Edited Guide.
Still, as long as writing like this is offered to h2g2, then rumours of its demise are premature.

Pin