[WikiEN-l] Asteroids

[Steve Bennett]

On 8/30/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at 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