Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Astronomy/Importance ratings

Margaret Kivelson
This entry has been ranked "low importance" despite obvious notoriety (350+ publications and 11,000+ citations). Can someone please reassess? Thank you.

JeanLucMargot (talk) 06:45, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and reassessed this article as 'mid' importance. Gobōnobō  + c 06:56, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

Astronomical Spectroscopy
The article above is/was unranked. I have upgraded it to high-level importance based on the criteria found on the ratings page Primefac (talk) 22:52, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard
Would someone knowledgeable but independent look at the article and assign importance and class? It was arbitrarily assigned WP:STARTCLASS to allow nomination at DYK. I think it's class C but not higher because of shortcomings pointed out in its talk page. Because of the scientific papers already based on the results and the likelihood of a huge impact in the future, I judge the importance as Mid but I wrote the article. Thanks, DocTree (ʞlɐʇ·ʇuoɔ) WER 00:15, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Neutron Star collision should be moved to importance: high
The actual detection and subsequent confirmation/nullification of dozens of longstanding hypotheses, including ones as important as 'where do heavy elements come from?' is a big deal. The black hole merger was amazing to the scientific community, but for most people, the fact it confirms relativity is not tangible enough to matter. This event, however, seems to have produced a glut of tangible tidbits that get people interested, like the statistic on the amount of gold in the resulting explosion. The fact the aftermath is in the visible spectrum is also gold, in terms of this.

So to that end, I propose that this article be moved to high importance, and perhaps another article like 'List of hypotheses confirmed by neutron star collisions' could be created as well. An entry in simple wikipedia would be great as well.

Show the tangible, empirical results that big projects like LIGO enable. Get science on the stage in this 'post-fact' time and show it's not just a bunch of math, that has no meaningful bearing on reality to the average person. Show that the scientific method makes predictions you can see with your own eyes. Lucasmarcelli (talk) 15:52, 5 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Per the current rating guidelines, I've re-rated GW170817 as high (counts as an event), and neutron star merger as mid (an object type). Modest Genius talk 17:38, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Well-cited?
The 'mid' criteria for People includes the following: How do people establish that they are well-cited without going through a lot of research? I think it should be revised to say something like the following: Praemonitus (talk) 15:48, 6 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Academics with a significant body of well-cited peer-reviewed publications.
 * Academics with a significant body of peer-reviewed publications in respected astronomy or physics journals.


 * The editor effort required is exactly the same, just sort by citations in whichever database you're searching for their publications (ADS, Google Scholar, Crossref etc.). I'm more concerned that 'well-cited' is subjective, but so is 'significant body'... I guess the criteria as written are asking for both quality (demonstrated by citations) and quantity (significant body) of work, not just quantity. Modest Genius talk 14:00, 7 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Fair point. Perhaps a conservative target would be 100 or more peer-reviewed papers over the course of a career? Or perhaps require that some number are cited elsewhere? Praemonitus (talk) 16:33, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Telescope makers
How do we rate notable telescope manufacturers who were not themselves known to be astronomers? For example, John Hadley. Is he a 'low' or 'bottom'? Praemonitus (talk) 15:33, 14 March 2023 (UTC)


 * That's a mix of topics that fall between the 'people', 'equipment' and 'institutions' sections of the guidelines. Use your judgement on how important / influential each one has been on astronomy. I imagine most of those articles will be either low or bottom, but they'd need reading to determine. Modest Genius talk 11:24, 16 March 2023 (UTC)