<?xml encoding="utf-8"?>
<A HREF="Content067#b" NOPUSH><</A>
trim it a bit, but it\'s still an improvement.\"
	
	\"And what does it say now?\" asked Arthur.
	
	\"Mostly harmless,\" admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed
	cough. 
	
[fn: My lifestyle is as gypsy and fancy-free as the characters in H2G2, and as a result my copies of the Adams books are thousands of miles away in storages in other countries, and this essay was penned on public transit and cheap hotel rooms in Chile, Boston, London, Geneva, Brussels, Bergen, Geneva (again), Toronto, Edinburgh, and Helsinki. Luckily, I was able to download a dodgy, re-keyed version of the Adams books from a peer-to-peer network, which network I accessed via an open wireless network on a random street-corner in an anonymous city, a fact that I note here as testimony to the power of the Internet to do what the Guide does for Ford and Arthur: put all the information I need at my fingertips, wherever I am. However, these texts *are* a little on the dodgy side, as noted, so you might want to confirm these quotes before, say, uttering them before an Adams truefan.]

And there\'s the humor: every writer knows the pain of laboring over a piece for days, infusing it with diverse interesting factoids and insights, only to have it cut to ribbons by some distant editor (I once wrote thirty drafts of a 5,000-word article for an editor who ended up running it in three paragraphs as accompaniment for what he decided should be a photo essay with minimal verbiage.)

Since the dawn of the Internet, H2G2 geeks have taken it upon themselves to attempt to make a Guide on the Internet. Volunteers wrote and submitted essays on various subjects as would be likely to appear in a good encyclopedia, infusing them with equal measures of humor and thoughtfulness, and they were edited together by the collective effort of the contributors. These projects -- Everything2, H2G2 (which was overseen by Adams himself), and others -- are like a barn-raising in which a team of dedicated volunteers organize the labors of casual contributors, piecing together a free and open user-generated encyclopedia.

These encyclopedias have one up on Adams\'s Guide: they have no shortage of space on their \"microprocessors\" (the first volume of the Guide was clearly written before Adams became conversant with PCs!). The ability of humans to generate verbiage is far outstripped by the ability of technologists to generate low-cost, reliable storage to contain it. For example, Brewster Kahle\'s Internet Archive project (archive.org) has been making a copy of the Web -- the *whole* Web, give or take -- every couple of days since 1996. Using the Archive\'s Wayback Machine, you can now go and see what any page looked like on a given day.

The Archive doesn\'t even bother throwing away copies of pages that haven\'t changed since the last time they were scraped: with storage as cheap as it is -- and it is *very* cheap for the Archive, which runs the largest database in the history of the universe off of a collection of white-box commodity PCs stacked up on packing skids in the basement of a disused armory in San Francisco\'s Presidio -- there\'s no reason not to just keep them around. In fact, the Archive has just spawned two \"mirror\" Archives, one located under the rebuilt Library of Alexandria and the other in Amsterdam. [fn: Brewster Kahle says that he was nervous about keeping his only copy of the \"repository of all human knowledge\" on the San Andreas fault, but keeping your backups in a censorship-happy Amnesty International watchlist state and/or in a floodplain below sea level is probably not such a good idea either!]

So these systems did not see articles trimmed for lack of space; for on the Internet, the idea of \"running out of space\" is meaningless. But they *were* trimmed, by editorial cliques, and rewritten for clarity and style. Some entries were rejected as being too thin, while others were sent back to the author for extensive
<A HREF="Content069" NOPUSH>></A>