[WikiEN-l] Asteroids

[Stephen Bain]

On 8/30/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at 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.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com