With respect it s not about whether the USGS is right or wrong it s about whether the appearance of a line of text on their website constitutes the act of classification and whether the date it was added to the website constitutes the date of classification My sense is that it is emphatically wrong to say Makemake was classified as a dwarf planet on 11 July 2008 All that happened on July 11 2007 was that the USGS got a name for the thing from the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature WGPSN They took their existing website which had Pluto and Eris under the heading dwarf planets and added Makemake under that heading Because of the hairsplitty nature of the 11 June 2008 decision on plutoid naming procedures they probably should have added a line clarifying that Makemake was named by WGPSN under the presumption of eventual dwarf planet plutoid status But they didn t Oh well Can t blame them frankly because it is so hairsplitty But even if you wanted to fudge the IMHO fairly asinine distinction between Dwarf planet and Object with H 1 that we re really really damn sure will meet the eventual definition of a dwarf planet that would mean Makemake formally became a dwarf planet on June 11 not July 11 Why Because that s when this release was made setting out the H 1 parameter It would also mean is a dwarf planet The gazetteer only lists named objects not those with provisional designations Things get added to that site as they get names not as they are classified not as they are confirmed to exist not as they are discovered It makes no reference for instance to S 2003 J 10 Why Because it isn t a moon No because it doesn t have a name yet It makes no reference to either Does that mean it s any more or less of a dwarf planet than Makemake is No Just that it s a body without a name Finally it s incorrect to say that the USGS has an IAU cite of Makemake s status as a dwarf planetthe IAU links under the dwarf planets heading have nothing to do with the case of Makemake specifically because they all date from March 2006 The IAU Q A sheet in fact can be pegged to the one day window between being classified as a dwarf planet and its subsequent receipt of the name Eris Either there are three dwarf planets in the solar system two of which are plutoids or five dwarf planets in the solar system four of which are plutoids You can t separate Makemake and because one has a name and one doesn t Most critically it is an emphatically OR statement to declare that reclassification occurred the same instant it got a name