On 8/30/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
By definition, any information which can be added automatically and never improved on does not strike me as exceptionally encyclopaedic. But then, I've already said this is a probably an irrational distaste, and I don't know if there are really any good reasons for not wanting 20,000 articles about unnamed, insignificant asteroids.
The "never improved on" is the key here. There's nothing wrong with automating addition of large amounts of data, like census data or geographical data, even to create stubs, when there's a prospect the stubs will turn into full articles.
I don't think that asteroid stubs would never be improved, but they would not be in the foreseeable future, unless they were among the small number singled out for study (or at least the ones with a name and not a number), in which case we'll probably have an article on them anyway.
One could of course put the data in a table in a list article, although it would be one mighty list.