(or "small solar system bodies", as we should probably start calling them)
Today, I noticed that rambot was alive again - just running tests, but it still made me think about mass-content-adding.
We currently have somewhere north of one thousand articles on asteroids; maybe 1200? Only two seem to have been deleted after AFDs, and at least one of those was a one-sentence stub; that said, there's only been about six deletion debates. So there seems, on the face of it, to be a vague acceptance of them.
This group of articles should, at least in theory, be something that could be filled out with bots - the basic asteroid article is "was discovered by A on B, named for C, part of group D, here are orbital elements E and very sketchy composition details F, external links to databases G and H." The main reason this is simple is that for asteroids studied in detail, we've usually written the article already!
So, this is me dipping my toes in the water.
a) Would people accept a mass-created set of articles like this, if done neatly and tidily and well-referenced? They're not of desperate general interest, but they're not going to clutter the namespace (nothing except asteroids is called "5464 Obscurename"), they're not going to demonstrate any particular cultural bias... and, hey, it's not like they're unverifiable.
b) If so... where's the limit? All asteroids known well enough to catalogue is excessive - there's well over 100,000 numbered and ~350,000 known - so we'd need a threshold somewhere (plus "obviously notable" cases). The first n asteroids? All ones with assigned names (~13,500)? All those believed to be above a certain size?
Feedback appreciated; I'll poke the data sources a bit in the next few days and try to put a more detailed proposal on the wiki.