On Sun, 26 Feb 2006 21:24:33 +0000, you wrote:
The thing is, if we have seven hundred pieces like that it's "an article in immense detail". If what we have is simply one line,
"* On [[14 January]] [[1687]], Hooke recieved a letter from Humphrey Grafton of Cambridgeshire, enquiring after the 7s. 4d which he had sent for a copy of Hooke's treatise on optics"
added because someone's great-to-the-n-grandfather was an astonishingly uninteresting gentleman of Ely who occasionally wrote to scientists, well, then it's trivia. If the writer was Newton or Pepys and Hooke wrote a blistering reply, it might even be vaguely interesting trivia.
A lot of these trivia entries would be perfectly fitted into a comprehensive biography of the subject, or a book-length study... but they don't neccessarily belong in an article which should, at most, be a few thousand words.
Thank you for coming up with an example so much better than my own. Guy (JzG)