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

You've got to smile, I guess.

Print books used to come with errata slips. I appreciated that.

Now, online Stuff can be corrected more easily, but the price we pay for speed is often typos. Fortunately, we have retroactive capabilities, which is why we have Editorial Feedback. Or even the chance to poke the Post Editor and say, 'What is that supposed to mean?'

Since this is a volunteer site, and the work is ongoing, it mostly depends on how much free time we have - and how many proofreaders we can sucker into it.

Online stuff can be corrected more easily, yes, thank Bob for that

But this reminds me: Long before 1984 I read a about why that would not necessarily be a good thing

Nah, I'm a positive and optimistic person, really I am, and I'm sure it will never come to that. It was thread drifting that forced me to write these last sentences. Sorry 'bout that, I'll get me coat

"how many proofreaders we can sucker into it. "

Oh, I wasn't suckered into it. I enjoyed proofreading, and got to read a lot of Entries that way..... had a few laughs too.

We should try to encourage more Researchers to get involved. The Editorial Feedback folk are (generally ) extremely amable** , as we would say here in Spain.

Are there any plans to remove the poorest Entries from the *Authorised* Guide?

** A favourite anagram of my real name is 'Amiably corpulent'.

You're right, we need to recruit more helpers, and if you know anybody who likes to proofread and has time on their hands, by all means point them in that direction.

The removal of entries is going on an ad-hoc basis. We really don't have anybody around with that kind of free time on their hands.

But if you see something that makes you cringe, take it over to EF, and let them look at it.

My own rules on quotation marks ("") and semi-quotes (' ') are simple:




Full quotes:

Exact verbatim quotes of statements either written or spoken, with an attribution.

Statements purportedly made by a fictional character.

(A concession to the internet.) Literary titles, irrespective of genre.




Semi-quotes:

Used to denote a new term when it is introduced into the text and defined for the first time.

Used to indicate material of specious character.




Other special notes of relevance, 'sic', following and end quote, indicating an exact quotation which includes and error.

That must be what's going on, ITIWBS.

Everybody's making up their own 'rules', and expecting readers to figure them out.

Like some quiz show where nobody knows what's going on.

Never heard a better description of life, Dmitri.

You're right, KB.

I just thought about it: it's like the 18th Century, when they didn't really agree on any of that stuff.

My paternal grandmother used to write just like that. She had a fine 18th-century style, complete with random capitalisation.

I had to read her letters out loud in order to puzzle them out. James Joyce had nothing on my grandmother.

The time my cousin won a beauty contest, though, she almost stumped me. You see, the cousin won a trip to the 'Hawaiian Islands.' Spelled the way my granny pronounced them.

only grammar(grandma) I knew, was me mam's mam - err"",,''

Finally and at long last a gra'ma of value

Skipping over most of the thread, for which I aplogise.

What I found most fascinating about this is that I was immediately put in mind of something that happened not very long ago - when an IED was placed on a Tel Aviv bus, during the recent Israel-Gaza kerfuffle (which gave most of us over here nasty flashbacks of the suicide bombing days), I've seen quite a lot of outrage over a BBC headline that had 'explosion' (or 'bomb', or something of the sort) in quotation marks. It was seen as a sort of odd, skeptic view about what happened, which in turn seemed to conform with the view of BBC News as pro-Palestinian (I don't read it much so can't testify if it's true or not, but that's the common conception over here). And at the time, I did think it was ridiculous. The basic facts of the matter were pretty damn clear: an IED was placed on a bus, and exploded. People were wounded. The quotation marks seemed to cast doubt where no doubt was required, and it did look rather bad.

But in light of what you just wrote, like about the 'bomb' under a car which actually was a bomb, I wonder - was it just another case of unfortunate orthography, rather than an ideological bias?

Okay, did a quick Google image search to not leave it a hypothetical - I am referring specifically to this: http://bbcwatchdot.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/bus1.png

Almost definitely, yes. The BBC has no Palestinian axe to grind. For example, they've a long-standing practice of showing humanitarian appeals from the Disaster Emergency Committee. The only time they diverted from this (at least that I know of) was when the appeal was for Gaza.

I think, when it comes down to it, it's a fear of taking ownership of their own copy. "It's not me saying that; that's what we've been told, anyway..."

Like I said, I have absolutely no idea one way or the other. I know that the common view here (especially among the Everyone Is Against Us crowd, which unfortunately is either very large or very loud or both) is that foreign media in general, and the BBC in particular, has a pro-Palestinian bias. When I looked for a picture of that headline, I found it on this site:
http://bbcwatch.org/about-us/
I tend to trust them about as much as I trust any 'Xwatch' site, which is to say, not much at all (as far as I've seen, these sites tend to draw targets around their arrows, i.e. specifically only look for and publish cases which support their hypothesis), but it seems like a good example of this conception I mentioned, and explains why the 'Bomb Blast' headline drew so much outrage.

I definitely favour the explanation that it's just a stupid orthographic trend - and, as you suggested, that the motive is a sort of, err, let's call it donkey-covering (I'm not sure if the filther is still around, but just in case).

Hmmm, the eye of the beholder

I remember some years ago when Israel - quite openly - tried to kill as many palestinian leaders as possible, BBC journalists were told not to refer to these actions as killings but to use all kinds of euphemisms

It left some of us concerned about how objective the BBC actually tried to be - or not...

I realize this will take this thread in a quite different direction so will not write more about it here. Anyone having any informations and meanings about this feel free to open another thread, thank you

Oh yes, I'm sure it's absolutely just an Eye of the Beholder issue. And like I said, I have no idea what it's really like, since I usually don't read BBC News anyway. I suspect that in such a large organisation, with so many different reporters (and different branches, too), you could find examples for pretty much whatever you decide you want to find.
(It's kinda like the people who believe they have found a 'Bible Code' where you skip a certain number of letters and find clues for all sorts of stuff; it's been proven that you can do this in War and Peace, too, or really any sufficiently large text.)

That's exactly it, Lady P! Putting those quotation marks in the wrong place makes people suspicious of all manner of things - including bias.

I'm sure you're all right. They aren't taking sides, they're being pusillanimous. Those stray quotation marks are a misguided attempt at CYA.

Oh, that code business. Let me tell you. We discovered that kind of thing back in the early 70s, before computers got at it.

It concerned Shakespeare. The Bacon people claimed there was a code in the first editions that proved Francis Bacon wrote the plays. (Pah! Has anybody bothered to READ Francis Bacon? Not 'Hamlet'.)

Anyway, some wags used the same code to prove that Francis Bacon wrote the New York City telephone directory.

Veering back to the proofreading thing, my better half is a qualified proofreader and editor with certificates and everything, and is now starting on getting to be a qualified indexer. She'd love to be able to make a living from it, but people just aren't interested. They're of the opinion that Word and other pieces of software handle it all for them these days, which is blatantly doesn't.

And at work here we copy and paste verbatim all text that clients supply, not correcting spelling or grammar at all, simply because if we do they complain, and if we don't they complain but at least we can point out it's their text that was wrong.

Good point! Everybody thinks content is optional.

It's all a picnic until they get in trouble with the autocorrect.