Talk:Moon

Etymology grammar

The last "paragraph" of the Etymology and Names section is a dog's breakfast of a run-on that needs to be reworked. However, I am unable to make head nor tails of it, and would risk botching the intended meaning if I took the red pen to it which it sorely requires. Someone, please fix this mess. 73.4.237.111 (talk) 12:22, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

At a minimum, changing the commas in the excerpt below to em dashes—or simply removing the redundant clause between them— would greatly improve the legibility.

Diana, one of whose symbols was the Moon and who was often regarded as the goddess of the Moon, was also called Cynthia

73.4.237.111 (talk) 13:01, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

I took a shot at straightening out that paragraph, based on the other Wikipedia articles. Special-T (talk) 14:06, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Much better, thanks. 73.4.237.111 (talk) 14:08, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 18 January 2025

The moon's polar (85 degrees north) min temperature is 70 K because 150x2 = 300, remove 230 (max temp) and its 70 Ertgiuhnoyo (talk) 10:47, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

 Not done: Any explanation given these figures are citing reliable sources? We prefer those to our own calculations. Remsense ‥ 论 10:57, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Capitalization

Currently, the article states, "The usual English proper name for Earth's natural satellite is simply Moon, with a capital M." with two footnotes to authoritative articles. How-ever, the articles are prescriptive, whereas "usual" implies descriptive. Unfortunately, Ngram Viewer seems to have disabled its case choice, so all returns are case-insenstive. That means I can't give data from that source. Still, my experience is that in general use (not NASA, Britannica, Science), the lower-case form is used more often, as it is by space.com and National Geographic. While this is not an adequate ground for changing the article's capitalization, I think if we can't get a good source of stating 'the usual use,' we should at least mention that there are two positions. Kdammers (talk) 02:44, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Here's the Ngram Viewer page that you may have been looking for. It says that for "the moon" vs "the Moon", the lower case one is more common, however we cannot conclude that these all refers to Earth's Moon. (For example a book about Europa may use "the moon" a lot to avoid repeating "Europa" over and over.) ―Panamitsu (talk) 02:56, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

If we can't source it, we shouldn't say that Moon is the usual name. As Kdammers notes, this does not mean we should re-litigate the usage in the article; we just shouldn't make that claim. We can re-word to note the prescriptive assertions. --Trovatore (talk) 03:03, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

the IAU is prescriptive, but the USGS is descriptive in its characterization. Remsense ‥ 论 03:16, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Arguably, but it doesn't say anything about "usual". I would prefer it to be usual to capitalize the M, but I think we all know that it's not, outside certain circles (sci-fi lovers, possibly astronomers). --Trovatore (talk) 22:35, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

(As long as we're nitpicking the sentence, it also seems wrong to say the name is simply Moon, which could suggest to non-native speakers that you could say something like Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on Moon. Actually this seems to have been changed — now it reads [t]he English proper name for Earth's natural satellite is typically written as Moon, which I guess is a little better, but I'm not sure it completely solves the problem.) --Trovatore (talk) 23:18, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Not sure there's much to do—there's only so much one can do if we want to be parsimonious but don't want to explicitly detail the nuances of the definite article in English. Remsense ‥ 论 23:21, 22 January 2025 (UTC)