On 30 April 2015 at 12:37, Thomas Douillard <thomas.douillard@gmail.com> wrote:
> Infovarius even complicated the problem, he put the number of "known"
> planets at some time with a qualifier for validity :)

Just to throw a real spanner in the works: for a lot of the nineteenth
century the number varied widely. The "eighth planet" was discovered
in 1801, and is what we'd now think of as the asteroid or dwarf planet
Ceres; the "real" eighth planet, Neptune, wasn't discovered until
1851.

Newly discovered asteroids were thought of as 'planets' for some time
(I have an 1843 schoolbook somewhere that confidently tells children
there were eleven planets...) until by about 1850, it became clear
that having twenty or so very small planets with more discovered every
year was confusing, and the meaning of the word shifted. There was no
formal agreement (as was the case in 2006) so no specific end date.

The moral of this story is probably that trying to express complex
things in Wikidata is not always practical :-)

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

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