On Wed, 2 May 2007, George Herbert wrote:
I think that the number is of questionable notability. 99.9999% of the people who see it aren't going to go code up a DVD player. For anyone else, it's purely a trivial point.
99.999% of people who are told the aphelion distance of Mars to eight significant digits aren't going to use it in any fashion whatsoever, let alone use the eighth decimal place. So?
That can't possibly be true. At least 5% of the people I know closely do or have done interplanetary trajectory work.
I highly doubt those people took the value from Wikipedia to use in their work. They got it from some other source.