Pippa and Si have inaugurated a marathon listening session for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by way of preparation for the upcoming Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, and it occurred to me that the Guide makes a plausible analogue to the Wikipedia (if you cut Douglas Adams a little slack for not getting absolutely every detail right). I figured I’d Google the combination, and the first few pages of results suggested (improbably) that I might be the first person to blog that comparison.
Plunging further into the results, though, I discovered that not only had the comparison occurred to somebody else who wrote it up online, but that my forerunner had gone one better by making the connection between the Hitchhiker’s Guide and the Encyclopedia Galactica (on one hand) and the Wikipedia and the print encyclopedias. Well done!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/
Thank You AKMA. It’s an honor to have the analogue seconded.
Laura points to the online Hitchhiker’s Guide, a site that came up as I was casting about for the comparison. It’s an intriguing endeavor, though (a) it deliberately differs from the Wikipedia in several ways and (b) the infrastructure of h2g2 shows little interest in the comparison (which was my main interest) — though someone posted a provocative challenge to h2g2 to differentiate itself more viviidly from the Wikipedia.
Ian, I’m intrigued that the explicit comparison hasn’t appeared more widely (though evidently it’ circulating among certain highly-advanced thinkers). I spent a lot of time over at David Weinberger’s blog trying to find a point at which he had mentioned HHGG, but came up empty.