Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Full moon cycle (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was redirect to Supermoon. Clear consensus not to keep. Editorial discussion may determine whether there is any non-OR content that can be merged from history.  Sandstein  07:45, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Full moon cycle
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Appears to be pure Original Research. Fails GNG. Probable HOAX. Carrite (talk) 03:28, 13 July 2017 (UTC) Last edit: Carrite (talk) 17:19, 13 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Comment - The first version of the article, from back in Oct. 2003 is instructive, providing a bunch of unsourced mathematical gibberish and noting that the term was first introduced in a list-serve post in Oct. 2002. Hardly where cutting edge science is published, eh? Carrite (talk) 03:41, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Comment - From the 2006 deletion debate: (1) I'm surprised that no one before me has named the cycle. (unsigned) (2) Discovering and naming a phenomenon is original research. Lunokhod 03:18, 15 December 2006 (UTC) Carrite (talk) 03:43, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Astronomy-related deletion discussions.  Jupitus Smart  04:16, 13 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Keep - this article does have several references at the end of it, negating the view that this is all original research. Most of the references are to books.Vorbee (talk) 09:32, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Riddle me this: do those books mention this term at all??? Do they cover the topic in a substantial way? Anybody can stuff a footnotes section, that's not what we need to assess. Does reputable scholarship even consider this "Full Moon Cycle" concept to be a thing, or was it created from thin air and buried beneath a bullshit avalanche of math? Carrite (talk) 17:08, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Top response from JSTOR (out of 5 total) is to an elementary education unit that is intended to teach 2nd graders about phases of the moon. I'm damned near slapping a HOAX flag on this POS. Carrite (talk) 17:14, 13 July 2017 (UTC)


 * HOAX flag is now up. Feel free to take it down if somebody can demonstrate that this "Full Moon Cycle" is actually a thing. Carrite (talk) 17:16, 13 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Delete. The article hasn't been meaningfully changed or improved in the near-decade since it was found to be buried under a landslide of original research.  By this stage it appears near impossible to disentangle this from any substantive, verifiable information that might be contained.  If there is a need for an article such as this (and if the title term itself can be sourced) that isn't better located in related articles, then the only real prospect for that happening is to delete the article as it is now, and start again building on verifiable sources.Landscape repton (talk) 17:49, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

*Strong delete: This page is pure pseudo-scientific cruft that has no references to the actual fake science and was obviously not written by someone with even a basic grasp on the subject of astronomy. D ARTH B OTTO talk • cont 23:53, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Supermoon: This is completely original research, but I made a mistake with my logic. I apologize for my incivility. D ARTH B OTTO talk • cont 08:53, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Supermoon. I don't think this should be tagged as a hoax, as the original author seems to be a long-term good-faith editor, with a strong interest in astronomy. It seems to be a more detailed mathematical coverage of the concept of supermoon and micromoon (the latter redirects to the former). But neologisms seems to abound here. Why full moon big rather than supermoon? Original research? Perhaps. Someone should verify the sources. Perhaps what was originally published in a list-serve has since been published in an academic journal? Google Ngram shows that the term "full moon cycle" has been increasing in usage since 1960, but look at the books using the term: Google Books, 1979–2003 – a term used to describe human relationships a term used in fiction. Redirect this to supermoon and maybe merge any valid, verifiable content that's not already covered in that article? BTW, I just learned a new word: syzygy. The similarity of that word to xyzzy had me thinking hoax, as in Colossal Cave Adventure, until I looked it up. – wbm1058 (talk) 01:54, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note that Supermoon, the superior-quality fork of this, was created as recently as 11 March 2011‎, while this article dates to 2003. – wbm1058 (talk) 02:09, 14 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Redirect to Supermoon. Not a hoax, but almost entirely original research on the page. Power~enwiki (talk) 05:41, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I will pull down the HOAX flag on your recommendation. Carrite (talk) 14:11, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * , perhaps it would serve a useful purpose to get the opinion of an astrologer astronomer, such as, to confirm the content? Atsme 📞📧 17:24, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, not so much an astrologer as an astronomer (though I have thought about whether it would be more lucrative to go into astrology). In any case, I agree with User:Power~enwiki's point that it is mostly original research, but not a hoax. It appears accurate to me, actually, though the jargon is totally non-standard. A Merge and Redirect to supermoon idea seems most appropriate as there may be some content worth rescuing even. The full calculations as to how 14 lunar months apply to this particular cycle might be worth inclusion. Also, I'll inform WP:FTN of this interesting conversation. jps (talk) 17:33, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * My sincerest apogees, - my mind is still light years away in the Mondegreen, and now I've fallen and can't get up. Atsme 📞📧 17:45, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

First, this is not a hoax. There is a cycle of about 412 days that appears in the apparent size of the Full Moon, and also is useful for predicting eclipses. Also see Eclipse cycle: many such cycles can be constructed and some have been described and named only in the past century. As for this cycle, this became a topic of discussion in a mailing list on calendars (CALNDR-L) but apparently was unnamed. Karl Palmen coined the name "Full Moon Cycle" in 2002. One needs a name to talk about something, and neologisms pop up all the time. For example Snowclone is exactly the same as cliché, or "template" as English speakers would call it, and the practice can be found in literature since the 3rd millennium BC: but someone found it necessary to coin a new name for it in 2004, and apparently it caught on and got a lemma in Wikipedia.
 * Comment - Yes, "Full moon big" sounds like something a non-native speaker might write and the full moon cycle term might be OR (I don't know) but the thing is a real thing. There are two important pairs of points on the lunar orbit: the ascending node, descending node and perigee and apogee (AKA apsides). The average time between Moon or Sun passing these all have absolutely accepted names except for this one: Moon passing node is dracon(it)ic month, Moon passing apsis is anomalistic month, Sun passing node is dracon(it)ic year (or eclipse year (or ecliptic year which I've never heard of which doesn't mean it's not real but I think is stupid since the Moon meets the ecliptic not the Sun, which is there 24/7). For some reason the Sun passing an apsis does not have a common term. (anomalistic year is already taken by the Sun passing it's own apsides) The Moon's apsides move prograde: 1 revolution every 8.85 years. As a result the average time between passages of the Sun and the perigee of the lunar orbit is c. 412 days (much more accurate values of the 8.85 number and thus the ~412 are available) The Full Moon is always 180 degrees of longitude from the Sun so Supermoons and Minimoons occur once every 412 days on average. And the weirdly stated cycle of Full Moons being um "full moon big", shrinking for 6 point something Full Moons (almost 7) then growing for c. 7 more really does happen. If named this cycle I'd call it the "anomalistic lunar year" but that term isn't too common on Google (because it's anomalistic and is basically a solar year adjusted slightly cause the apsis is always walking away from Sol and is a special kind of lunar year). (Note: Astrologers call the ascending and descending nodes the North Node and South Node but that's stupid since these are the only times the lunar latitude has no northness or southness whatsoever. And Supermoon and Minimoon are more of a popular science/casual stargazer term than a science term. Perhaps this will not be so in the future) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:35, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Strong Redirect/Weak Merge - I strongly highly advise to have a redirect to Supermoon as per other remarks proposing to redirect, but some key information if arises might if warranted get merged into said article but it's an option. Ryan (talk) 23:06, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Comment - I'll note as nominator that a redirect to Supermoon is fine for me; I'm not an astronomer (or an astrologer, ha ha!) but this article came up in an off-wiki discussion of Wikipedia's Worst as an example of the most blatant OR violations. I'm happy that it's not a full-on hoax, actually; I certainly wouldn't know. Carrite (talk) 02:22, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Comment As one of the original authors I like to comment.

@User:DarthBotto: your assessment as pseudo-science and fake science shows lack of insight. Not all astronomy is about black holes or lunar geology. Positional astronomy was all there was to astronomy before the 19th century; but the origin of the science, and indeed of science itself, was looking for regularity in natural phenomena like this.

If and to what extent the cycle was known and used in history is unknown. It was superseded by better longer cycles like the saros and the cycle of 251 lunations, which is very present in Babylonian astronomical texts but in 3 millennia also has not received its own proper name. The FMC is 1/16th of a saros and this division appears on the Antikythera mechanism as described by Alexander Jones c.s., as referenced in the FMC article.

I do argue that the cycle is of some current interest because of the regular media attention to supermoons. This FMC article explains why those occur.

Much of the article is about using the FMC to find the date and times of full moons (and new moons) and for predicting on which ones an eclipse can be expected; most of that is from my hand. This has been called "original research" and people question why it has not been published. The fact is that the FMC article describes a very simplified, dumbed down version of an algorithm published by Jean Meeus in his Astronomical Formulae for Calculators (ca. 1980) and his Astronomical Algorithms (1991, 1992, 1998), which I do cite as the reference in the FMC article. Meeus took the method from a paper by Paul Ahnert Hansen from Leipzig in 1857; Hansen published tables on the motion of the Moon who were the best of those days, but he hasn't got a Wikipedia article. Meeus filled in modern parameters for the lunar motion. I tried to publish a paper on the method with modern parameters back in 1985, but it was considered not sufficiently novel or of general interest for a scientific publication. So the chance of getting the approximation described in the FMC article published in a peer-reviewed journal (paper on electronic) is zero. There is a nasty chasm between what science editors consider too trivial to publish, and what Wikipedia guardians consider not trivial but "original research".

In the end encyclopedia's are written by people who know stuff for people who don't know. I understand that the content must be verifiable, but I find the criteria that people enforce on Wikipedia unworkable. Why must every number be published on paper before we are allowed to use it in Wikipedia? Why is it called "original research" every time I use a calculator? In the FMC and elsewhere (e.g. New moon) I provide my sources and explain the derivations in painful detail. Everybody with a secondary education should be able to follow the arithmetic and verify its validity. Why must the outcome be published on paper? It is trivial so not "original research" and impossible to publish. On the other hand it is tedious to have to derive the same number every time you need it, so there is merit to record the result once and for all. If you need verification, do the math if you are competent. If you are not, don't criticise.

As another example, there are some misconceptions on Easter which I have tried to address in Computus, giving the canonical reference, with the Latin text, and my translation. The Latin was removed because we are not allowed to use Latin that almost no-one understands in the English Wikipedia, and my translation because it was considered "original research" and|or unverifiable. Fact is that much old material has never been printed in an English translation. For example, Hansen's thesis from 1840 was still in Latin. And recently I learned that Wikipedia policy forbids using primary sources, anything you write must be from secondary sources. This means that much knowledge will be lost.

I imagine that rules such as these are introduced because the directors want EVERYONE be able to easily verify the validity of the content. However I think it is sufficient if SOMEONE can do the validation. Otherwise, Wikipedia can only contain things understandable by the least educated user, and will be of no interest to most people. Tom Peters (talk) 07:41, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The numbers themselves don't seem to be the issues. See WP:CALC. However there is a lot of non-standard terminology which seems to have been invented for the article. jps (talk) 09:26, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
 * There are a couple of references in this talk article about non-standard terminology, but no examples of the non-standard terminology were given. Please explain what non-standard terminology you are referring to. Victor Engel (talk) 17:35, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Start with the name of the article. No source calls it "full moon cycle" as such. Then go on to the lede. "Full moon big", "full moon young", "full moon small", and "full moon old" are all terms that are not used anywhere but in this Wikipedia article. Moving on, we see the coining of "perigee year" which is also non-standard and unique to this page. You can keep going through the article if you'd like, but this just illustrates the problem. jps (talk) 12:45, 17 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Comment - The concept is certainly a real thing, but perhaps hasn't been of interest until the media's obsession with supermoons that began just a few years ago. This could explain why there aren't a lot of sources that talk about it.  My suggestion is to clean the article up to make it more coherent and "encyclopedic".  There's a ton of information there now that is not really necessary for explaining the topic.  --Lasunncty (talk) 10:04, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
 * "Keep" - I was a participant in the discussion on the forum mentioned earlier in this discussion, and I personally verified and derived separately the results contained here. As Tom Peters says, it just takes some arithmetic (using values found here in wikipedia, in fact) and a dedication of time. I would suggest that it not be redirected to the supermoon article. The supermoon and the full moon cycle are not the same thing, just like noon and a clock are not the same thing. Should an article on clock be redirected to an article about noon? A supermoon is an event within the full moon cycle, just like noon is an event marked on a clock. Victor Engel (talk) 17:44, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
 * So he did the research and you checked his math. Textbook scientific OR. Carrite (talk) 15:07, 18 July 2017 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.