[WikiEN-l] Asteroids

[maru dubshinki]

On 8/29/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at 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