Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Human spaceflight/Wikipedia 1.0/Importance

Great start

This is an excellent start towards a rational system for "importance" ratings! (I wish there were anything this good for WikiProject Spaceflight!) As a first specific comment, I think some articles about single missions should be of "Top" importance. I'm thinking particularly of Vostok 1 and Apollo 11, but I bet there are a handful more. Looking at it differently, maybe we should target some number of individual missions, say maybe five or ten, that deserve a "Top" importance ranking.... Again, getting this started is great ground-work for the overall effort! Thanks! (sdsds - talk) 21:04, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

That's probably a good idea - we should construct a list of the 'top five' single spaceflights, and keep it narrow. I'm thinking Vostok 1, Apollo 11, Freedom 7, STS-1 and Voskhod 2? Colds7ream (talk) 13:27, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Articles which couldn't be cut from an abridged encyclopedia

Another way to look at this is to ask, "If we had to make an abridged version of our encyclopedia that would fit on a single CD (or two CDs, or a single DVD or whatever), which articles would we absolutely need to keep?" Taking Apollo as an example, even for the smallest encyclopedia we would want both Apollo program and Apollo 11. It's not clear we would need Apollo Lunar Module or Apollo spacecraft, though. In fact, I would suggest the more broadly scoped "Apollo spacecraft" article should have the "High" importance rating, and "Apollo Lunar Module" the "Mid" rating. (Currently the spaceflight-importance ratings of these two are the reverse of that.) Does working with specific examples of rationales like this help? We could (probably should) include some specific rationale examples in the project page. (sdsds - talk) 00:26, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Possibly, although by putting Apollo spacecraft below Apollo 8, say, we're declaring that a single usage of a spacecraft is more important than the spacecraft itself, which is probably a bit dodgy? Colds7ream (talk) 13:33, 15 February 2008 (UTC)