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

Ah yes, I recall having a bit of fun with dear old Charlotte and her tin fixation.
A2592344

Pour any three tins in a pot... isn't that what everyone does?


That entry's class, Pin. That should be in every Guide to Life.

Hang on, have you got another version? Because I could swear that paint was blue.

Nope. Don't remember that.

It's your paint, though, so maybe it *is* blue.

I like that, Pin I hadn't seen it before.

I don't come to h2g2 nearly as much as I used to, but I do keep coming back, and it is for the weird eclectic discourse that you just don't find anywhere else.

I do have a thought on why Wikipedia seems to be more popular. (Forgive me if this has already been mentioned.)
You just don't see guide entries popping up in a google hit-list. Jodan said "I might be googling around for some information, and my own entry would come up." I have to say I've never seen that happen and I make my living out of searching for information.
Kids are constantly using Wikipedia articles for their homework (even though we try to discourage this, and show them more authoritative sites or databases). I've never come across anyone referencing an hootoo article.

Why don't we pop up in google more? It would bring more people by and perhaps a whole new wave of researchers.

I noticed some people in this thread comparing facebook. I fail to understand why. It's a totally different creature. I only recently joined facebook and have since been contacted by five long lost cousins and a long lost friend. I don't see any reason to choose one over the other because I have totally different reasons for using both.

I think part of the reason that our Entries don't show up is that each one has a robots="nofollow" metatag, which means that search engine crawlers don't follow any links in the Entries. If it weren't for that tag, we'd have something like 50,000 extra links flying around in the Edited Entries alone, and that would give us a big kick up the rankings.

I thought it was something like that. I vaguely remember reading something to that effect when I first joined hootoo.

I asked Jim Lynn about the tag a few weeks ago, but he hasn't replied yet. I've just gone and poked him

"Why don't we pop up in google more? It would bring more people by and perhaps a whole new wave of researchers."

I hate being negative , but I believe it may be something to do with these statistics

H2G2 - 8974 Edited Entries in the Guide.
Wikipedia - 2,107,785 articles in English

How can we hope to compete for sheer numbers? We can't simple as. We need to be different enough to be interesting.

And thats me now with my new shiny Scouts hat on.

Depends what you're googling - some things are useless on Wikki.

Now this is another threat.

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/google-aims-to-capture-market-for-inaccurate-crap-20071216602/

Many of those 2 mill wiki entries are 'stubs', which is another way of saying 'useless'.

McKay, is that the British equivelent of The Onion?

Similar.

I'm another person who dropped off and has started to lurk again. I wrote a couple of entries and had good feedback in Peer Review. I spent more time in PR than writing really.

About a year or two ago I gave up on PR because it was full of school age fantasy essays on fantasy worlds. These are things I used to write - I have some old notebooks at home full of them. What I wanted to edit was an eclectic range of factual stuff about the universe and encounters in it (I also never cared about punctuation in PR unless it was intrusive: it was the ideas I wanted to get involved with: let the author write and the sub edit - too much of PR was people doing both).

I have a whole bunch of meta-physical essays on my home page on doctrinal theology that I have never submitted. I do think that an article to explain the quite rational but somewhat obscure system system for numbering the radial Adelaide bus routes would be far more useful.

How to capture this? Would anyone agree? Encyclopaedia Galactica (aka wikipaedia) may be more complete, more authoritative and slightly more accurate, but when things are blue who would it help?

Wow, well said

"I also never cared about punctuation in PR unless it was intrusive: it was the ideas I wanted to get involved with: let the author write and the sub edit - too much of PR was people doing both"

Exactly how I feel - though I try to proofread it before I submit it, I think PR is the place to discuss content, and the ideas behind the entry - not just how the ideas are submitted.

I'd encourage you to submit more of your stuff.

I think that something important happened today.
This Entry: A29878744 is on the Front Page, and is now part of the Edited Guide.

It's important because it defies one of the worst clauses of the Guidelines A53209: "Writing about a past event is usually factual, but don't attempt to dramatise it..."

That clause wasn't in the original Guidelines, or indeed in the early revisions. Those versions are long overwritten, but their content can be inferred by surviving collaborative drafts, such as this one: A873074

The decision to suppress dramatic writing was a major mistake by TPTB. The target was presumably fictional dramatisations of real events, but as Trout's Entry shows a piece can be very dramatic and yet scrupulously factual. Fiction never got through PR even before the clause, and so the only consequence of an ill-thought-out editorial edict was the elimination of one of the key ways for h2g2 to set itself apart from Wiki. Our writing got more turgid. Instead of passionate Entries, we got a marked increase in winsome and facile ones.

Your own Entry on the Ashtabula railbridge disaster was a major step on this same road, Jodan. Your piece was sober and measured, though. Trout's is almost frantic with excitement.

I hope that people will ignore the bad clause in future, writers and editors alike. I hope, indeed, that the community might formally request its removal. Perhaps it's more useful, though, for us all to provide more Entries in this one's spirit.

Pin

Y'know, looking at the collaborative draft, it struck me that if the guidelines have been amended in the past by the community, they can be amended again. There's a lot of precedent for community authorship of help pages actually. Myself and others helped to write the <./>RF5</.> page. There's a long and storied history of the rules for banning members, and of course the Update process. Anyone have a good reason why the Writing Guidelines shouldn't be rewritten?
I mean, setting aside for the moment the issue of the Soul of the Guide, the Guidelines are in poor shape anyhow. All the example entries link to entries from the first two years or so of the Guide's existence. There are way too many guidelines, I think, and I suspect it's visually off-putting to new writers for the site to see those. And of course there are a few totally superfluous guidelines.

Should be more like this maybe?
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