Welcome to h2g2! This tour looks at different parts of the site and includes advice on how you can get involved. The tour has seven parts including this one - you can use the links bar above to find your way through them.
We'll kick off with the answer to the most important question of all: What is h2g2?
What is h2g2?
h2g2 stands for 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' - an unconventional guide to Life, The Universe and Everything. This site - the Earth Edition of the Guide - is an encyclopaedic project contributed to by people from all over the world. h2g2.com was launched in April 1999, and the BBC took over the running of the site in February 2001 as part of a drive to develop new and innovative online services.
Anyone can write for the Guide, which already has thousands of entries on all sorts of subjects. Meaningful collaboration is encouraged and users help one another, feeding back on what others have written using a peer review system. The result is a living, breathing guide that's constantly being updated and revised, driven forward by the very people who use it.
h2g2's inspiration comes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the best-selling book by Douglas Adams, one of the original founders of the site. Back in 1971, Douglas lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, thinking about the galaxy and how you might find your way around it. His solution, the 'Guide', was an ingenious device that offered advice about almost any place, object, entity or event you might care to name - all at the convenience of your fingertips. This vision is now approaching reality, both on the Internet and on mobile phones, in the form of h2g2.
This page replaces the original at A317459.
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