Wikipedia:Peer review/The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/archive1

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Been working on polishing this lately. Any suggestions? Morwen - Talk 16:28, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Good to see a fine article on a book close to many Wikipedians' hearts. Here's a few thoughts, hope they are useful! Worldtraveller 17:13, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Describing h2g2 as "almost but not quite entirely unlike" Wikipedia in the intro is a great use of the phrase, but a bit of a self-reference, and unless it's a quote from somewhere seems rather unencyclopaedic in tone.
  • It's an inappropriate quote from the books. Have fixed.
• In the 'books' section, does the paragraph in italics really need to be? I think it would look better with "Note:" removed and in normal text, no reason to draw such attention to it I think.
  • Done.
• The bit about the BBC turning down the chance to publish the book and later regretting it could do with a direct reference - a few other citations of statements and the like would also be nice.
  • I've done that particular one, although I'm not sure how to properly format such a reference...
• The section on "Restaurant at the end of the Universe" has most of the Brontitall incident was omitted and Instead of the Haggunenon sequence... - the reader needs to know what these were, or perhaps it could just be left that some bits were omitted, a description is probably unnecessary.
  • I've linked the appropriate episodes for these phrases. Could omit I guess.
• You could maybe mention some reactions to the film, including disgust from some diehard fans.
  • • Have done so, but need now to reference these.
      • Have added a link for you, for you to take a look at.
• I think you could add some bits about DA's legendary dislike of deadlines. If I remember rightly from Neil Gaiman's book, there were stories of him finishing writing episodes of the second series virtually as they were being recorded, and also being locked in a room by his publishers for a week to get him to meet one oft-rescheduled deadline.
  • These stories are indeed true (in one case I believe it was pondered to send the first part of an episode for broadcast whilst they were working on the second part - this turned out not to be needed).
• In a few parts, there are lots of very short paragraphs, which could be merged into larger paragraphs for better readability and flow.
• I think the paragraphs where there's a main article might be a bit over-abbreviated, would be nice to have a little bit more material in this article for a good overview before going to sub-articles.
  • We've been trying to keep the article from exploding in size as we have added new material. I've been trying to de-emphasise descriptions of the plot and add real world info - also the sections about the LP and stage versions are new, so we've been editing some sections for tightness whilst adding new. It is about 40K last time I checked. If we add more stuff about the writing (and I want to add a bit more about the popular reaction at the time too), then expanding other sections by more than a tiny bit looks unwise. Morwen - Talk 18:40, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks very much for your comments! Morwen - Talk 18:40, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

More good stuff! Well done. My only comment in addition to Worldtraveller's was what was a "Fit" (Fit the First, etc) - I guessed it meant "episode" but the article could say so (the term is already discussed The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Primary and Secondary Phases) . -- ALoan (Talk) 20:27, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Too many short paras, merge. Note that Wikipedia:Lead specifices lead should have at most 3 paras. Remove external links from article, move to notes, link with Wikipedia:Footnotes. And the template-note seems an overkill, I'd suggest deleting this template and replacing it with a simple, standard note. Expand the stub section 'Cultural references' with info its from main article. Otherwise, good job, I expect seeing this on FA soon. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 10:47, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

We had a discussion about the Hitchhiker's Spelling on one of the sub-pages. Trouble is, since we've decided on Wikipedia that we're sticking with "Hitchhiker's Guide" (one word, one capital H, no hyphen), but the pages could be duplicated elsewhere, it makes sense for us to have our own template. Plus it IS included on more than one page, especially where included images show "Hitch-hiker" or "Hitch Hiker." Such use, IMO, meets the requirement for a template. --JohnDBuell | Talk 14:44, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Done a bit more expansion, along with Morwen. I think we've covered about everything we've wanted to cover (judging by the article's talk page). I need to create the new The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as international phenomenon article and discuss many things: attempts to do the movie in Hollywood from 1983 to the "green light" in 2003, stage shows, radio broadcasts (US rebroadcasts on NPR, translations elsewhere).... Anyway, I think we've got a "set form" for the main article itself - still need to clean up references/notes, but how do others feel about where we've gone with this? --JohnDBuell | Talk 00:45, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The note about the spelling really needs to be done using Wikipedia:Footnote3, especially if you would like it to be a featured article. Also sections where the of use parenthesis to mention where the fact came from, (example: ...and at this time Adams (according to the 25th anniversary reprinting of the radio script book) suggested that...) would probably work better in note format. MechBrowman 03:21, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)