Project Galactic Guide

Project Galactic Guide (PGG) is a collaborative project inspired by "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", the fictional encyclopedia in books by Douglas Adams. The project's FAQ describes PGG as a

:" [...] collaborative Internet attempt at creating an electronic reference meant to guide and misguide its readers in matters of life, death, and finding a parking space anywhere in the universe." [http://www.galactic-guide.com/faq/faq.shtml#what-is-pgg]

PGG has three classifications for articles: "real", "unreal" and "semi-real". Real articles attempt to provide accurate, factual information in an amusing and enjoyable style. Unreal articles are for humour value only (like Uncyclopedia articles). Semi-real articles are a mix of both. All PGG articles have their classifications clearly marked in parentheses by their titles to avoid confusing the reader.

History

Project Galactic Guide is one of the oldest Internet encyclopedia projects. The project was started in 1991 by participants of the alt.fan.douglas-adams newsgroup. Paul Jason Clegg proposed the idea of creating a real guide to the galaxy. Since the participants of the newsgroup had computers and programming skills, they developed the idea, creating software tools and writing articles, and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the " Known "Galaxy" was born. Originally, Clegg wanted only factual articles in the guide, but the desire of contributors to write less than accurate material overruled Clegg's idea, and the project became known as Project Galactic Guide.

Work on the guide has slowed to a halt in recent years. The newest dated official article in the guide is "Terschelling, Friesland, Netherlands, Earth (Real)" [http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/6R111.html] , which was accepted July 7, 2000 (there is later article entitled "Greek Cruises (Real)", but it has no date [http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/6R97.html] ). The development of h2g2, which was backed by Douglas Adams and his company, The Digital Village, may be partially responsible for the lack of PGG participation.

PGG today

There are 1780 articles in the Project Galactic Guide. The project's website is currently maintained by Alex McLintock. In October, 2002, he gave the following assement of PGG's status:

:"I still run the website and we usually get a few comments on articles each day... What we don't have is active editors who can help create new articles. So in that sense yes the PGG is dead." [http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=3db7cf73.5404321%40news.ntlworld.com]

The project's newsgroup, alt.galactic-guide, has been abandoned, and new posts are primarily spam messages.

PGG has a wiki called the PGGWikit. It was implemented as an idea bank and collaboration area for draft articles. The wiki is active, but because of the lack of editors, no new material from the wiki has been added to the official PGG. As of early 2005, the wikit has been made inactive due to the trashing of the wiki by spammers.

See also

* Everything2 — an online collaborative project that started with goals similar to PGG's
* h2g2 — the other major guide effort inspired by "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
* Wikipedia — the wiki-based free encyclopedia project
*List of online encyclopedias

External links

* http://www.galactic-guide.com -- The Official Project Galactic Guide Horseshoe
* http://www.galactic-guide.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl? -- PGGWikit
* http://groups.google.com/groups?group=alt.galactic-guide -- alt.galactic-guide, PGG's newsgroup