I just tested H2G2 now, and it performs fine for me.
Here’s a recording http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxvsQrfALJc
Is that how slow it was for you?
To a great extent, online services like Wikipedia benefit greatly from the network effect. It looks like Wikipedia hit that critical mass of users first and the rapidly growing side of the sigmoid curve took over from there.
One explanation for that might be that early Wikipedia was more open-ended, while H2G2 appeared to be specifically focused on location-based information. That led to more early growth, which caused media attention, etc. But that’s just a guess.
Although, even now, it looks like H2G2 is not nearly as general-purpose as I inferred from the conversation here. The two links above to wikipedia, both pretty common, basic things I’d expect to see in such a site, have no apparent target on H2G2. Looking at the search page for ‘Network Effect’, it is clearly dominated by sci-fi irrelevancies, and appears to be basically broken.
Never heard of it before this thread. That’s probably why.
The reaosn it isn’t successful is, I think, quite obvious:
Because it’s a joke.
If you want people to be interested in an collaborative, open online encyclopedia, naming it after a humourous work of fiction is a very stupid way to do it. The name of the website will either be totally indecipherable to someone (if they know the reference is to the book) or tends to make one assume that it’s a humour site (if they know the book.)
If you want to create a project like this you’re better off coming up with an original name that kind of sounds like “Encyclopedia.” Like, you know, Wikipedia.
…
Having now browsed through H2G2, it’s also unworthy to be called a reference work. Nothing is cited and the articles are of appalling quality. It’s people trying to be Douglas Adams. They fail.
In addition to what everyone else said, it’s got a stupid name.
I have a hard time parsing “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” out of H2G2. HHG2G I could get, but H2G2 just sucks for a name.
Things often succeed due to the passionate drive of an individual or small group to make something happen. Rarely can you just throw something out there and it takes off all by itself.
I assume Jimmy Wales pushed wikipedia to make it a success, to make people aware of it and to make it open to everyone. I doubt the BBC approached their project with the same passion, mostly because I have never heard of H2G2 before but I heard or read about wikipedia when it was still new.
An obvious and far more entertaining name would have been DontPanic.com
I agree on this point- as I understand it, H2G2 was coined by a sci-fi writer and early blogger (not Douglas Adams) back in the days when pretty much everyone on the internet knew everyone else, but that doesn’t help much now when pretty much the entire world lives near an internet. So it was a sort of amusing “in-joke” back in Ye Olde Days, but not one that makes sense when no-one else is in on it anymore, basically.
Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
It’s more of a chemical formula than an acronym
I’d never even heard of it before this thread. So this:
…seems to be the correct response.
More specifically, it didn’t reach critical mass. User-generated content hosts require lots and lots of users to, well, generate content. Plus, they require lots of users to access that content to ensure that it shows up in searches.
It’s akin to asking why Facebook prevailed over MySpace and Friendster and all the other social networks (answer: partly because MySpace sucked).
I disagree. I think Facebook prevailed because of an insanely competitive person that pushed it and made the right moves. Critical mass is part of that (and competing sites sucking is also part of it), but I think for this example the critical mass happened only because of Zuckerberg (and the others).
I used to be a Hootooer, I’ve contributed to a couple of articles and had a couple of meets with some really lovely people from the site.
The thing is that it’s a fan site, more than anything else. People were drawn there by Douglas, and after he died people who’d made connections there stuck around as posters and contributors, but a lot of the soul went out of the community. Couple that with some of the (frankly disastrous) changes made by the Beeb, and it just never really recovered.
There was a very long while there where the Beeb had tried to update the interface, and it was a massive failure. The current front screen is trying so very hard to be “Wikilike”, but for a while it was a mish-mash of flash and horrible colours because it was trying very hard to be more like myspace and attract a younger audience.
It’s never really known what it wants to be. Douglas wanted it to be like Wikipedia, before Wikipedia was born, so there was no real template to take it from. After Douglas died, the Beeb wanted it to be the next big social network, so they tried to skew it towards the myspace aesthetic, which drove off a lot of old contributors (Who did contribute a LOT of very good information), and brought in a lot of new blood that just didn’t care for the history of the place, they just wanted it to be like every other social networking site out there.
It would never have been as big as Wikipedia, because a lot of people who aren’t skewed nerdy will just go “Oh, that’s that stupid Sci Fi book they made that dumb movie about” and pass it over, whereas Wikipedia doesn’t have that “gimmick” - Wikipedia just is. But I think it would have stood a chance to be a decent second-string “niche” player if the Beeb hadn’t run it into the ground before trying to prop it up on a string and pretend it was still alive.
That makes a lot more sense, Sierra- thanks for the insight! It’s kind of sad, though… when you think about it, the Guide Adams described is basically “Wikipedia/Wikitravel that doesn’t take itself very seriously” and would (IMHO) have made a brilliant actual travel guide if done properly.
The name h2g2 came from the HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy, yes, artistic licence was taken.
It’s also an old site, around 12 years now I think. The internet’s changed a lot since it was first set up and because of what’s happened to it, you have to forgive it a lot. Well, you don’t have to but you should.
Back in its early days h2g2 was very close to securing the funding needed to continue to be the dream/visionary thing that was planned for it. It was already pioneering a lot of stuff we see now as normal. Chat forums, blogs, reference articles, social networking were all there. But the dot.com bubble burst and the funding fell through. That left a lot of talented people out of work. That’s when the BBC stepped in. They were approached about taking it on, and they jumped at the chance. Until then they’d tried several forum/community systems but just couldn’t get one to work and stick, and with the code behind h2g2 they were being handed one on a plate. One condition though, they had to take the site and the community along with it.
They did, but they didn’t really know what to do with it so it languished for ten years. No real development so to speak. There were a couple of new skins to try and make it look more modern, but they were looking outdated before they were even launched. The latest “update” created more bugs than it fixed, and there was still no innovation.
As for the writing, it used to be very easy to contribute articles to it, but it was quickly found that it wasn’t a financially viable model to have an inhouse team of editors checking the quality and accuracy of everything, so volunteers were brought in. Which lead to peer review, while this does help with the quality of the entries, it’s led to a bogged down system.
Needless to say the community that helped form it have drifted away over the years, and apart from a few dozen that have hung on there’s not many people contributing to it at the moment. Even though it gets around 150k unique visitors a week to read it.
Even with those numbers the BBC decided that as part of their cost cutting, they were going to sell it. So, it’s been sold now. With the new owners however, the community have got a say in how it’ll be run, and what direction it should take in the future. After years of moaning about how they were neglected, and how the site’s languished, they can now put the ideas into practice.
h2g2 (you may or may not like the name) once pioneered what could be done with the internet, give it a year or so and you might well see it doing that again.