[Wikipedia-l] Non-notability "abuse"

[Andrew Gray]

On 17/09/2007, Ian Tresman <ian2 at knowledge.co.uk> wrote:

> I noted that Wikipedia has 1000 article on all
> 1000 of the "top" asteroids (and many more), few
> of which are any more notable pieces of rock than
> another. In this instance, Wikipedia is acting as
> a catalogue, and many of the articles are merely
> "stubs". But that's fine by me, I'm sure asteroid #547 is notable to someone.

547 Praxedis is fairly obscure, but there's been some work on it;
relatively routine light-curve stuff, but a proper published paper,
which is more than you get on some moons of Saturn...

(and certainly as much as you get for some tiny offshore islets, which
we generally accept as normal)

There's interesting baggage kicking around with regards to our
assumptions, but I do think it's fair to say that we should expect to
have differing standards for tangible physical features compared to
those for intangible social constructs like theories or works.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk