On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via naked eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that there are more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire planet. Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article.
No. I sure hope you're joking or being sarcastic.
And it is feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if something as dull as Proxima Centauri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri) is any indication.
No, since there isn't enough people on Earth to do that by a factor of billions. And even if we automated it, who the heck would ever read any more than the absolute vanishing tiny fraction of it? And how would the wikipedia back up such an enormous database of articles? And what are they all there for if, for all intents and purposes nobody reads them?
And if it's automated why not just automate generating an article if anybody actually wants that article from the databases? And in that case if it's automatically completely generated it's not part of the wikipedia per se. And tools that can process the data in multiple different ways, not *just* generate *an* article for *a* star are normally much more useful anyway. Again it's not something that the wikipedia gets involved in, and I don't think it ever should.
We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft". We should expand them instead.
Look, at the end of the day, there's a law of diminishing returns. Your email here is a poster-child to the absolute uselessness of having an article on each entry of a large database.
No offense meant, but this is the dopiest idea I have ever seen.