Thomas Dalton wrote: I suspect Thomas' comments were intended to be ironic. I certainly hope we never reach the point where there are serious votes of "Delete, NN intelligent alien civilization". Though considering how we've treated articles about the fictional ones, perhaps I shouldn't lay odds...

On Feb 3, 2008 7:53 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: What if the hypothetical existence of one is verifiable? Aren't all galaxies inherently notable?

On Feb 3, 2008 10:08 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: The hypothesis can be verifiable. Not exactly, no. I'm pretty sure it's a lot, though. Of course I'd only be referring to the ones we know about! Well, see above. In the case of galaxies that no one has ever written about, the question of "notability" is moot. http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/021127a.html We estimate there are hundreds of billions. But only 3000 are "visible". I wonder what "visible" means, and I wonder how many are "observable".

On 03/02/2008, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: In which case, we're talking about the notability of a hypothesis, not of a galaxy or an ETI. The hypothesis could have an article, but would a galaxy that's only claim to notability is being mentioned in this hypothesis warrant anything more than a redirect to the ariticle on the hypothesis? Well, we need to stick to the observable universe, certainly - anything outside the observable universe is causally disconnected from us, so is certainly not notable. I think that 3000 is how many there were in the tiny bit of sky they looked at. I think it's a reference to the Hubble deep field (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_deep_field). The total number of galaxies in the observable universe is in the billions, certainly.

I guess it's similar to people notable for a single event - we have an article on the event, not the person. The difference is rather subtle in many cases.

On Feb 3, 2008 11:20 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Err, the number of galaxies in the observable universe is probably 10^10 - 10^13 or something ... the number of known galaxies? The number of known galaxies is probably a couple million, which is, I believe, the number in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. If someone really wanted to write the articles .... But I do advocate [[WP:V|A third party source]] as a minimum inclusion criterion (Perhaps this is why I've been called "an inclusionist troll"), and only galaxies which've been catalogued in some publication should have articles - maybe 2 million tops. Which some such articles might not be of interested again for a while, they're certainly verifiable and encyclopaedic, and not doing any harm. Cheers, WilyD

On Feb 4, 2008 12:38 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Err, depends on how detailed the catalogue is - I've never looked at SDSS galaxy data, so I'm not sure, nor derivitive catalogues. Some "catalogy" datasets actually contain a reasonable amount of information with which to write a few sentences. Substubs are probably a fiction anyhow - there'll be a backlash against "classification creep" before too long - the featured articles of 2004 are the B class articles of 2008. But as for writing from catalogues - not five minutes ago I wrote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9912_Donizetti from essentially two catalogue entries + a naming citation - while slightly more than a single catalogue entry, but the point still sticks - [[9912 Donizetti]] is clearly a stub, not a "substub" - it contains almost all the important bits of information on the body. I actually noticed now it has a type from an SDSS catalogue, which means the article, so three cataglogues + naming citation .. fine, the point remains. Useful, short, acadmic, written from catalogues + a naming citation. Three sentences, true, because most of the information is better presented in an infobox. Without that, it'd be two or three paragraphs. But almost all this information is available in a single catalogue from the Minor Planet Center, yet supports a reasonable article ... and certainly more informative catalogues exist to boot. Cheers WilyD

On Feb 4, 2008 1:37 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: In the end, what's wrong with an article that contains the sum total of human knowledge on a subject, even if it's short, as long as it's verifiable and on a subject matter suitable for an encyclopaedia? WilyD