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Online Hitchhiker's Guide Thriving
An anonymous reader writes "A company bought the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy website (h2g2.com) back in 2011 after the BBC decided to dispose of it as part of a cost saving measure. Although it still isn't a complete guide to to Life, The Universe and Everything, it has just celebrated its 14th birthday as a constantly expanding, user-generated work."
I thought that was what wikipedia was for.
c++;
"It is said that despite its many glaring (and occasionally fatal) inaccuracies, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself has outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters on the cover."
for the phish.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
The Guide is sprinkled liberally with editorial license, and, if sprinkled with pepper and Altarian rhino snot, can be used as a survival bar, indefinitely. There are also side helpings of sarcasm, off the wall humour, black humour, mauve humour, and the humour of a hyperintelligent yet bilious shade of blue.
Whatever h2g2.com is, it isn't the guide, lacks license, and, much like this post, lacks humour of any description, and wouldn't sustain you if served on toast.
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
$1 says the AC poster has a financial stake in hitckwiki from the phrasing of the post.
So it is more like Encyclopædia Galactica then it is like a Hitchhikers Guide.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"Don't Panic" was not written in big friendly letters.
$1 says the AC poster has a financial stake in hitckwiki from the phrasing of the post.
Are you insinuating that the GP's link is trying to help hitchhike traffic from here to there? Ridiculous!
When compared to the other leading online guide to everything... It's a riot.
So why does everyone write hitchhiker as one word then? If they want it to be h2g2 they should write it as Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Yep it's sunday...
Whatever h2g2.com is, it isn't the guide, lacks license, and, much like this post, lacks humour of any description, and wouldn't sustain you if served on toast.
Keep in mind that The Guide was written by Douglas Adams, whereas h2g2 was written by a large number of people who, whatever their strengths, are mostly not Douglas Adams.
I think that would explain the difference. (Of course you could also argue that even in the Hitchhiker's books, most of the fictional Guide's contents were probably not very funny, and as such those parts were never quoted in the Guide novels. If you wanted to split hairs)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
h2g2, as anyone who worked for BBC Online at the time would tell you, was disposed of because of a mandate by Tony Blair's administration to to protect corporate interests. The Minister for Culture, Media and Sport forced the BBC to dump a lot of stuff that they were doing pretty well with at the time because companies complained that it was unfair for them to have to compete with a publicly funded institution. So instead of suggesting they compete on quality, the government just told the BBC to cancel a lot of its projects so that the gap in the market could be taken up by a private company offering a shittier for-profit service. I believe the chief complainants that brought about this change of policy were the usual cunts (the Murdoch Empire et al.) Granted, in the case of h2g2, Wikipedia already existed at that point, so it wasn't such a major loss (although Wikipedia is obviously a lot less light-hearted).
Cutting "non-essential" parts of the of their output were a compromise offered by the Beeb, as at one point there was serious concern that the government was going to order a total shutdown of their entire online service including their superb news output. The cost savings mentioned were more along the lines of "ok, we'll cut the resources that we put into online and cull a few sub-sites" to try to satisfy the politicians that they wouldn't continue competing with private enterprise.
and encyclopedia dramatica was written by random people and it's hilarious. it's what would have been included as the entry for earth on hgttg as "mostly harmless". because shortening it as mostly harmless is hilarious.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
...and it was a lot of fun. I met many interesting, smart and funny people there. Then the BBC bought it and instigated this absurd censorship where anything deemed offensive by the BBC was removed, including words in non-English languages. That's right, if you posted something in a language other than English, your post got removed. The blatant censorship was so ham-fisted, I left the site a couple of weeks later and have never been back.