Talk:NGC 1052

NGC1052-DF2

Why wouldn’t this galaxy have it’s own article. Just because it is close to NGC 1052 doesn’t mean they need to be in the same article. The Magellanic Clouds are near the Milky Way, but I don’t see anybody wanting to merge those articles. The galaxy Dragonfly 44, which is notable because it is almost entirely made of dark matter, has it’s own page, so why wouldn’t we do the same for a galaxy which is notable for having possibly no dark matter. Both objects are equally notable in my opinion. And note that the name as it is used in the Nature article is NGC1052-DF2, not NGC 1052-DF2. I’m not sure how important that is. EighteenFiftyNine (talk) 06:20, 31 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

1) Thanks, EighteenFiftyNine.
2) I think that you're entirely right in theory.
3) But there are a few short-term problems in practice, unless somebody has the necessary expertise to do a proper job or is willing to spend the time to learn how to get it right.

3a) The first relatively minor problem is finding out what is the correct name format. (Incidentally in a sense the article already exists, as NGC1052-DF2, with no blank space, which is currently a Redirect to the NGC 1052-DF2 section here).
3b) Then there's the question of the data about it. Some of the data shown for NGC 1052 presumably also apply to NGC 1052-DF2, but it's not clear which, tho it probably will be clear to quite a lot of our readers. And the source database currently seemingly has no data on NGC 1052-DF2, so unless somebody finds similar data for NGC 1052-DF2, transferring the paragraph about it to a new article will tend to initially deprive the afore-mentioned 'quite a lot of our readers' of easy access to useful info, thus arguably tending to slightly disimprove the article and Wikipedia at least in the short term, arguably contrary to the spirit of WP:IAR and the related 5th Pillar of Wikipedia, WP:5P5.

4) However Wikipedia is a work in progress and we are encouraged to be Bold, so any editor who wants to try creating the new article should feel free to have a go, and not worry too much about the above-mentioned risks of getting it wrong.

4a) I'd probably have a go myself except that right now I don't have the time, and by the time I do I will probably be a lot less interested (see WP:NOTCOMPULSORY and WP:BNO), as by then it will be too late to get onto ITN (see here, or see here once the previous link stops working due removal a few days from now or due to a name change such as adding "[Closed]:"). That would make it far less likely to attract readers, altho it currently seemingly has little or no chance of achieving the required consensus to get onto ITN anyway (for which a necessary but not sufficient requirement is normally at least a 2 to 1 'supermajority' of !votes, which are currently tied at 5:5, or 6:5 if I add my !vote as nominator). And that was even without the fix-demanding templates it has recently acquired and which would probably not be legitimate to remove until the suggested new article had been created.

5) Thanks again, and regards, Tlhslobus (talk) 17:17, 31 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I created the new section in NGC 1052 for this object. It isn't clear whether it is physically associated with NGC 1052 or not, but it is in the same galaxy group and fairly closely-aligned. Only time will tell. Just as only time will tell whether it should have its own article or becomes another footnote in the history of non-discoveries.

The name is problematic. The electronic version of the discovery paper that I have certainly appears to show the name as NGC1052-DF2, without any spaces. That name would be somewhat odd, but the authors are making up this nomenclature on the fly and can do anything they want. Likewise, everyone else can adopt a slightly different nomenclature into standard use, and the usage with a space is very common, for example at NASA. Maybe the electronic copy is messed up, maybe people are just ignoring something they think is a mistake, or maybe most people wrote the space without checking, again too soon to say.

So, what to do? I don't see a huge problem with it where it is. People will find it, given suitable redirects, and not be surprised. A separate article is arguably acceptable. There is only a single primary source, but a lot of secondary sources. Just remember that scientific notability is not the same as Wikipedia notability: scientists are excited, or at least interested, in NGC 1052-DF2 because of its potential implications for the whole of cosmology, while 99.99% of the world might read a press release or some space porn about a rather boring blob and move on. Similarly, Wikipedia is not a newspaper, we don't have to mirror everything that is news today and forgotten tomorrow. I wouldn't suggest deletion of a well-sourced article about this object, but equally I didn't have the time or really the inclination to write a standalone article. I would propose deletion of yet another one-liner stub created just because an object popped up in some press releases. You could be bold or you could sit tight: very often these articles about interesting new discoveries will get created fairly quickly, and it really isn't the end of the world if it doesn't happen today. Lithopsian (talk) 21:44, 31 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

After coming across the recent paper on the galaxy, I also felt there should be a corresponding wikipedia article. Since this is a consensus towards 'split' so far, I went ahead and did it.

I used the formatting of the name as in the preexisting redirect page.

I know wikipedia is not a crystal ball, but there will certainly be more papers on this soon: at least one on the objects in the galaxy by the same authors is in the process of being published, in addition to expected discussion of the dark matter aspect in the near future. CyreJ (talk) 14:00, 2 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]