[WikiEN-l] Asteroids

[Andrew Gray]

(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
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk