(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.
On 8/29/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
(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.
--
- Andrew Gray
A quick off-hand observation: any asteroid which comes anywhere close to hitting Earth is automatically notable in my book. Personally, I'd also say that any asteroid large enough to cause extinction-level events should probably also have at least an entry in a list, but I don't know whether that sentiment is widely shared. :)
~maru
On 8/30/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Speaking very personally, the asteroid articles annoy me. It's an irrational hate, I agree. But when doing various types of maintenance, they always seem to pop up, often in the "most wanted redlinks" (because hundreds of asteroid articles seem to link to each other, or to missing asteroid articles).
Maybe I just personally find them uninteresting? Maybe because for the vast majority, nothing interesting will *ever* be written about them. At least for Hicksville West, Somecountry, there's the chance that a local resident will write a paragraph about how Mr Famous spent 3 nights there in 1934.
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.
Steve
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.
At 08:17 +0200 30/8/06, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/30/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Speaking very personally, the asteroid articles annoy me. It's an irrational hate, I agree. But when doing various types of maintenance, they always seem to pop up, often in the "most wanted redlinks" (because hundreds of asteroid articles seem to link to each other, or to missing asteroid articles).
Maybe I just personally find them uninteresting? Maybe because for the vast majority, nothing interesting will *ever* be written about them. At least for Hicksville West, Somecountry, there's the chance that a local resident will write a paragraph about how Mr Famous spent 3 nights there in 1934.
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.
Steve
Asteroids, cricket statistics, all the same really.
Gordo
On 30/08/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
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!
Sounds good. But fergoshsakes just put the info in a table. Worst thing about the town rambot articles is that they're pretty crappy prose but it never gets edited, ever; second is that the demographic information came from a table and should be presented as a table, not as crappy prose.
As for notability and verification - they wouldn't have numbers if they hadn't been verified sufficiently to get one.
- d.
On 8/30/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Sounds good. But fergoshsakes just put the info in a table. Worst thing about the town rambot articles is that they're pretty crappy prose but it never gets edited, ever; second is that the demographic information came from a table and should be presented as a table, not as crappy prose.
Yeah. I bet over time the crappy prose of all these town articles will slowly be edited in different directions, becoming different, equally crappy, prose.
I was tempted to edit one once, then realised how many times I'd have to repeat my work. Eek.
And since we're having a whinge, the other problem with an article like that is you think it's actually fairly complete. You'd think that 3-4 paragraphs of text would be a decent amount for a small town. Whereas it covers the demographics, and that's it - no history, no geography, no "the construction of a Walmart caused uproar in 2005".
Steve
On 8/31/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/30/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Sounds good. But fergoshsakes just put the info in a table. Worst thing about the town rambot articles is that they're pretty crappy prose but it never gets edited, ever; second is that the demographic information came from a table and should be presented as a table, not as crappy prose.
Yeah. I bet over time the crappy prose of all these town articles will slowly be edited in different directions, becoming different, equally crappy, prose.
I was tempted to edit one once, then realised how many times I'd have to repeat my work. Eek.
And since we're having a whinge, the other problem with an article like that is you think it's actually fairly complete. You'd think that 3-4 paragraphs of text would be a decent amount for a small town. Whereas it covers the demographics, and that's it - no history, no geography, no "the construction of a Walmart caused uproar in 2005".
Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
G'day folks,
Personally, I think that a comprehensive coverage of towns is one of our strengths at least in the first world. If there was verifiable concern in a town over the construction of a Walmart, I have no problem with our article saying it.
If someone wants to write about the history and geography of their local area from reliable sources more power to their arm. We have had a number of Featured Articles on towns and things that wouldn't be listed in traditional encyclopedias. This, in my view, is a good thing.
We probably need more on local areas in third world countries but that will come. We had a featured article on Central Asian history recently for example which is encouraging.
If someone wants to write articles on asteroids and other astronomical bodies from reliable sources, good on them. If people looking for that information come to Wikipedia, that is beneficial.
It definitely falls within my understanding of the Sum of all Human Knowledge.
Regards to all
Keith Old
Keith Old wrote:
On 8/31/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/30/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Sounds good. But fergoshsakes just put the info in a table. Worst thing about the town rambot articles is that they're pretty crappy prose but it never gets edited, ever; second is that the demographic information came from a table and should be presented as a table, not as crappy prose.
Yeah. I bet over time the crappy prose of all these town articles will slowly be edited in different directions, becoming different, equally crappy, prose.
I was tempted to edit one once, then realised how many times I'd have to repeat my work. Eek.
And since we're having a whinge, the other problem with an article like that is you think it's actually fairly complete. You'd think that 3-4 paragraphs of text would be a decent amount for a small town. Whereas it covers the demographics, and that's it - no history, no geography, no "the construction of a Walmart caused uproar in 2005".
Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
G'day folks,
Personally, I think that a comprehensive coverage of towns is one of our strengths at least in the first world. If there was verifiable concern in a town over the construction of a Walmart, I have no problem with our article saying it.
If someone wants to write about the history and geography of their local area from reliable sources more power to their arm. We have had a number of Featured Articles on towns and things that wouldn't be listed in traditional encyclopedias. This, in my view, is a good thing.
We probably need more on local areas in third world countries but that will come. We had a featured article on Central Asian history recently for example which is encouraging.
If someone wants to write articles on asteroids and other astronomical bodies from reliable sources, good on them. If people looking for that information come to Wikipedia, that is beneficial.
It definitely falls within my understanding of the Sum of all Human Knowledge.
Regards to all
Keith Old
Yea but, I agree with the statement above that such imported data is best represented as an infobox. So I suspect most of these will be one sentence and one info-box stubs. That is a very tempting AfD target to some. Perhaps irresistible.
SKL
On 8/30/06, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I think that a comprehensive coverage of towns is one of our strengths at least in the first world. If there was verifiable concern in a town over the construction of a Walmart, I have no problem with our article saying it.
If someone wants to write about the history and geography of their local area from reliable sources more power to their arm. We have had a number of Featured Articles on towns and things that wouldn't be listed in traditional encyclopedias. This, in my view, is a good thing.
I think you misunderstood what I was getting at. I *agree* with all of this. What I don't enjoy is tabular data being misrepresented as prose written by a human. And specifically, the *lack* of all the types of information you're mentioning. There is a lot more to a town that demographics.
If someone wants to write articles on asteroids and other astronomical
Key point: If someone wants to write articles. But they don't. They want to automatically generate thousands of pseudo-articles from tables of data.
Steve
--- Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
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!
Not a good idea since that is all we know about most asteroids and those data would be far more useful in a big table of asteroids, not on individual pages for each space rock.
In fact, the basics are already in the List of asteroids tables.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroids_%2839001-40000%29
We can just add to the table.
-- mav
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
On 30/08/06, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
Not a good idea since that is all we know about most asteroids and those data would be far more useful in a big table of asteroids, not on individual pages for each space rock. In fact, the basics are already in the List of asteroids tables. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroids_%2839001-40000%29 We can just add to the table.
Excellent! So what we need then is a forest of redirects.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
On 30/08/06, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
Not a good idea since that is all we know about most asteroids and those data would be far more useful in a big table of asteroids, not on individual pages for each space rock. In fact, the basics are already in the List of asteroids tables. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroids_%2839001-40000%29 We can just add to the table.
Excellent! So what we need then is a forest of redirects.
- d.
Ok, this is an even better idea. I am a strong believer in the idea that 50 articles that have no hope of ever becoming more than a stub can (sometimes) make a single good article. We might want to add links to the various online DB's that are essentially the primary sources for most of this as well. I think most of the major astro catalogs are available online now days.
SKL
On 8/31/06, ScottL scott@mu.org wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 30/08/06, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
Not a good idea since that is all we know about most asteroids and
those data would be far more
useful in a big table of asteroids, not on individual pages for each
space rock.
In fact, the basics are already in the List of asteroids tables. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroids_%2839001-40000%29 We can just add to the table.
Excellent! So what we need then is a forest of redirects.
- d.
Ok, this is an even better idea. I am a strong believer in the idea that 50 articles that have no hope of ever becoming more than a stub can (sometimes) make a single good article. We might want to add links to the various online DB's that are essentially the primary sources for most of this as well. I think most of the major astro catalogs are available online now days.
SKL _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Folks,
I would be happy with that if we don't have a lot of information about them.
I suspect that over time with researchers working on studies of these bodies more information will become available about them and we will be able to expand some of them into legitimate articles.
Regards
*Keith Old*
On 8/30/06, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/31/06, ScottL scott@mu.org wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 30/08/06, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
Not a good idea since that is all we know about most asteroids and
those data would be far more
useful in a big table of asteroids, not on individual pages for each
space rock.
In fact, the basics are already in the List of asteroids tables. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroids_%2839001-40000%29 We can just add to the table.
Excellent! So what we need then is a forest of redirects.
- d.
Ok, this is an even better idea. I am a strong believer in the idea that 50 articles that have no hope of ever becoming more than a stub can (sometimes) make a single good article. We might want to add links to the various online DB's that are essentially the primary sources for most of this as well. I think most of the major astro catalogs are available online now days.
SKL _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Folks,
I would be happy with that if we don't have a lot of information about them.
I suspect that over time with researchers working on studies of these bodies more information will become available about them and we will be able to expand some of them into legitimate articles.
Regards
*Keith Old* _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I'm not an asteroids expert, but I follow the Minor Planets Mailing List, IAU announcements, and new discoveries fairly closely. For most of the umpteen-tens-of-thousands of objects, all we essentially have are orbital elements, some sighting dates and positions, a magnitude, spectra, and deduced size and class. In some cases, there's not even a spectrum or officially deduced size or class.
Various spacecraft missions are planned to get a whole lot more data on some of the more interesting ones, and distant remote observation programs are being considered which would fill in a lot of the gaps now in basic magnitude / spectrum / orbital path details to high precision / etc. But it's going to be hard. Most of these are far enough away and small enough that they're only at best roughly pixel sized for Hubble or even the Next Generation Space Telescope, so getting a "better picture" necessarily means a spacecraft, and at tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars per spacecraft, the fraction of asteroids we'll visit up close in the next few decades seems likely to be small.
On 8/31/06, ScottL scott@mu.org wrote:
Ok, this is an even better idea. I am a strong believer in the idea that 50 articles that have no hope of ever becoming more than a stub can (sometimes) make a single good article. We might want to add links to
I agree. People often go too far, though, merging articles that were quite happy as two separate short articles. I'm starting to get a preference for a short article that says "Fooville was a small hamlet in Ireland that was integrated into Dublin in 1930. For more information see the History of Dublin", rather than just #REDIRECT [[History of Dublin]], and hoping that at the time you look, the small reference to Fooville is still there.
Steve