Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Full moon cycle

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 keep. 1ne 20:43, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Full moon cycle

Full moon cycle (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Non-notable astronomical term. The entire article is an amazing example of original research. Tom Peters (talk · contribs) and Karl Palmen (talk · contribs) have been the main contributors. Not sure why this wasn't caught earlier... Gzkn 09:04, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Note, I was looking at this version when I nominated. Jmax took out the most eggregious OR violations, but seeing as how Tom and Karl basically built the article from the start ([1]), I still think it's original research. Maybe someone can convince me otherwise... Gzkn 09:21, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Keep

As one of the main authors of the article I obviously think it should stay.

• On the term: the cycle has been known "forever", but does not appear to have had a proper name. Karl Palmen needed a name to refer to this particular cycle so he invented one; mind that originally we called the article "fumocy" but that was changed to "full moon cycle" just because the term was not well known, even though the cycle is. A similar example: the term snowclone was recently minted on an on-line forum to describe an existing phenomenon, got an article on Wikipedia, which was submitted for deletion, but apparently prevailed. I propose to separate issues with using a neologism, from the subject and its Wikipedia article itself.
• On original research: The variation in the apparent size of the Moon has been discussed in recent popular-astronomy publications as referenced in the article. The latter part of the "full moon cycle" article on using the cycle to more accurately predict the syzygies is recent "original" work (application or invention rather than "research"), but that happened among some people on a mailing list and not in the context of the Wikipedia. So I ask these questions: what is considered research (as distinct from other original work) and when does it stop to be "original" and becomes acceptable to each and every editor on Wikipedia?
• On acceptance: googling shows many rip-offs from Wikipedia. Of potential relevance to this discussion is that the article has been translated into several other languages, so obviously several people found it of sufficient interest to bother doing a translation. The first non-wikipedia use of the term that I found was http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/hebrew/suggest.htm ; admittedly that is on the website of a member of the same mailing list so he was familiar with the term; but again I think we should separate use of the neologism from the use of the cycle.

Tom Peters 12:08, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks Tom. Questions: were those calculations/tables in the article published elsewhere before they were put into this article? Do you know of any publication that discusses the Full moon cycle? Gzkn 00:42, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Some popular literature is listed as such under Literature in the article, and referred by author and year within the article; the cycle seems to have remained unnamed until Karl Palmen started using a descriptive one. The ideas of applying the cycle to calendars and syzygies have been developed on the CALNDR-L mailing list, and can be retrieved from its listserver: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ECU.EDU . To get the most relevant posts, send this message to that list server: "GETPOST CALNDR-L 15949 15950 15958 16044 16322 17855 17944 18058". To search for "fumocy" send the message: "SEARCH fumocy IN CALNDR-L"; since that is >> 100 posts, better specify a date range, e.g. "SEARCH fumocy IN CALNDR-L FROM 20030201 TO 20030228". You will find more material on Victor's website at http://www.the-light.com/cal/ . We never bothered to try publish this in a paper journal: it is, as stated by a commentator, pretty obscure (the mailing list counts ~150 members), and electrons are so much cheaper than cellulose. Tom Peters 01:17, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

From this, it looks as if even calling it a "full moon cycle" seems to be original research, not just labeling it with the neologism fumocy. Are there any verifiable sources (books, astronomy publications/journals for example) that refer to this cycle? If so, what do they call it? I don't see the popular literature you refer to. Are you talking about the references section? If so, aren't those references just being used as sources for two or three sentences and a table, as the article seems to indicate? Gzkn 07:31, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the two Sky&Telescope articles. The old one from Meeus discusses the anomalistic month and its effects; the one from Sinnott notices the 413d = 14 lunation period in lunation lengths, but he does not name it. Already Kidinnu of 4th cy BC knew that 251 lunations form a more accurate cycle, I'll have to look up if older clay tablets containing the 14-month cycle have been preserved.

So can't we have an article about a cycle that is of some interest but has not (yet) received a commonly accepted name? The article actually was renamed from "fomocy" to the descriptive phrase "full moon cycle", and the Wikipdedia is full of such lemmata (which I deplore). Again, the use of this cycle to compute syzygies was original research, but took place outside of Wikipedia. So I think from a policy point of view the issues are: when does research stop to be original and is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia; and what is an acceptable reference? Incidentally, the chance that any editor will publish a paper on this is zero, because they will Google, find all the stuff has been on-line for years and translated into several languages, and will accuse us of ripping off from Wikipedia. Anyway, I believe the NOR policy exists to help maintain NPOV and verifiability: and the contents of this article are not controversial, and can be verified by anyone with moderate arithmetic skills and the interest to follow the steps. Tom Peters 09:30, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

• Comment — The topic is valid and encyclopedic, although obscure. At least some parts of the text appear original, although I have by no means checked all the details. Exact computation of the lunar orbit has a long history, so I'm leaning toward a keep unless it can be demonstrated that this is hogwash. — RJH (talk) 18:18, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep and cleanup. Not hogwash; although "fumocy" is a neologism. The data here are correct as far as I can see; and useful, which is why the article is on my watchlist. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:58, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

The question is wether this is original research or not. Not whether this is correct and useful.Lunokhod 17:13, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

• Please see full moon and new moon as well. These have similar problems. Lunokhod 00:02, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
• Remove all original research, or delete. I do not have a problem with the content of this article, and I suspect that it is probably correct. Therein lies the problem, it is probably correct, but unverifiable unless one redoes the calculations himself. Nevertheless, it is wikipedia policy that encyclopedia entries should not contain original research, or even a synthesis of established facts (see Wikipedia:No_original_research). If this article was only a synthesis, I would not care, even though this goes against their policy. However, much what is written is describing new work, albeit, probably uncontroversial. Some of the work on lunar phase, new moon, and full moon has similar concerns. I propose (1) removing all original material or deleting, and (2) I propose that the authors publish this somewhere. Publishing does not have to be in a scolarly journal, and could be in a popular journal like Sky and Telescope (as one example among many). Publishing might also mean a web site describing the calculations in more detail, but this would be more gray. Lunokhod 00:26, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

I take issue. First, AFAIK the Wiki policy on original "research" serves to maintain a NPOV on possibly divergent opinions. The policy exists to prevent what is essentially an encyclopedia to be mis-used as a forum for discussion or propagation of certain opinions. Therefore there is no ground to declare that policy applicable to just any article that just applies well-known concepts and data in a verifiable manner to obtain some possibly new results. However I would agree that Wikipedia ALSO should not be a place to develop or publish uncontroversial but original work. But second, that is not the case in this instance: stuff was done in some on-line forum. So I repeat my question: when does new stuff stop to be "original" and becomes acceptable for Wikipedia? Also, I find your requirement that it be published in a paper journal (refereed or not) ludicrous in this Internet age. Third, those other articles you mention are off-topic here, but I do remark that it shows that you take the concept of "original research" much too far: those articles have some numerical expressions that have been derived from published sources by simple arithmetic (and in one case even bothers to explain the steps in some detail to help verify the result). Since when is doing multiplication and addition "original research" that threatens the NPOV character of Wikipedia? Tom Peters 10:32, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Please read Wikipedia:No_original_research. There are three pillars to Wikipedia policy, No original research, neutral point of view, and verifiability. All material that could be questioned needs to be referenced. If you can not find a suitable reference, then this is a good indication that the first and third points are being violated. I also did not imply that material needs to be published in a scholarly journal: popular magazines or even a web site could be appropriate. The point is that the reader must be able to go to some form of "source" to find the details laid out in a coherent manner. As I said above, I suspect everything in this article is correct, it is just that it is the first time that it is being presented, and is therefore new. I quote from Wikipedia policy

Lunokhod 16:28, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes I read that, especially the that appears to advance a position. The policy is about NPOV. Also I am appalled that I need to point out here that an encyclopedia is all about synthesizing and summarizing information from various sources; you are not even allowed to (only) literally quote published material because of copyright. Tom Peters 11:17, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

The article does present a position: it is presenting a method to calculate esoteric orbital cycles of the moon. Nonetheless, whether or not the article has a neutral point of view is irrelevant. Original research is not verified research. It cannot be published in Wikipedia. Dr. Submillimeter 13:43, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

• Weak Keep - interesting, yes, but not written in an encyclopedic manner that would explain the charts & graphs to a non-expert. There does seem to be historical precedent, so a good re-write to get rid of OR would bring this up to snuff. SkierRMH,01:53, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

• Keep Well written. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 03:22, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
• I'm surprised that no one before me has named the cycle. (unsigned)

Discovering and naming a phenomenon is original research. Lunokhod 03:18, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Keep but you may remove details of the specific method given of using the full moon cycle to reckon accurate moon phase, which is orginal research. --Karl Palmen 09:35, 14 December 2006 UT

• Redirect to Lunar phase - The article as it is written represents original research. A Google search on " 'full moon cycle' -Wikipedia" shows that the term "full moon cycle" is more commonly used to refer to the 29.5 day lunar cycle. Since lunar cycle is currently a redirect to lunar phase, I suggest redirecting this article to lunar phase as well. Dr. Submillimeter 10:27, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Lunar phase is the hog wash, the calculation of the phases of the moon there is incorrect. A while back I took some data from Naval Observatory and plotted the amount of time between full moons. You get a nice pattern of composition of sinisodal curves documented in this article. You can see the graph at [2] which is what is reported here. --Salix alba (talk) 10:56, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Note that that link repeats what Sinnott published in Sky&Telescope in 1993, as quoted in the Full moon cycle article. Also note that the author finds a main frequency component with a period of about 413 days, which is the fumocy. Tom Peters 11:47, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

• Keep -- I participated in much of the original research starting in 2002. I have not participated much in crafting this wikipedia article, because I'm not very comfortable with the format. Furthermore, I consider Tom Peters to be eloquent and thorough. By the way, in response to why this wasn't caught before -- it was. The entire article was deleted once before as I recall, and then restored after some discussion. If there was consensus to restore it before, what has changed to merit removal once again?

Regarding the comment that "full moon cycle" more commonly refers to something else, my response would be that the appropriate action would be not to remove this page but to add a disambiguation page forking to both meanings. The meaning described here is a valid meaning. If "full moon cycle" is not the appropriate term, then I ask (as I did in 2002) what the appropriate term is. The concept is clearly valid, confirmed, sound, and useful. As to the original research objection, there is a large volume of original research off of wikipedia. This article is not a forum to advance the original research. Rather, the original research was conducted off-list. Tom Peters and I did most of the analysis to design the procedure, numbers used, etc. TP's techniques were different from mine. We used different epochs, methods, etc. yet arrived at similar results. In other words, we confirmed each others' research. Publicatio was to the CALNDR-L email list, whose archives are available to subscribers. I think publication elsewhere is a good idea, and I will work on doing so as I have time. I will also post an archive of relevant discussions on CALNDR-L, if for no other purpose than to provide a usable citation to web references to this topic. Further suggestions on this are welcome. Victor Engel 17:18, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I would not consider a list of emails on a listserver to be a publication; this material needs to be presented somewhere in a coherent manner. I think that a web site would be a first attempt, but this would not represent a consensus of the scientific community. For wikipedia, though, this might be ok: At least in this case one could honestly debate the issue. (The question of original research, which was the grounds for proposed deletion can not honestly be debated by anyone who has read wikipedia policy.) Lunokhod 17:42, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I think my viewpoint is harsher than Lunokhod's. Engel and Peters have effectively self-published their own results in an email list. This is not at all comparable to publication in a scientific journal, where the journal needs to agree that a paper's analysis is valid before publishing the paper. Placing their derivations on a personal website is also inappropriate, as this is still self-publciation. (I could write an external web page that says "the Moon is made of brie" and cite it in Wikipedia, but my web page would not be a valid, reliable reference in that case.) Moreover, the research needs to be critically reviewed. Two individuals that discussed their own derivations with each other could have made identical key errors in their derivations. Their derivations need to be rigorously evaluated by an anonymous third party to check for errors (just as scientific journal articles are refereed by anonymous scientists that are uninvolved with the research but knowledgable enough to comment on it). Dr. Submillimeter 20:40, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Fine: Wikipedia is being peer-reviewed constantly, so why don't you just do that? As far as I am concerned, the whole project was to make the thing (finding the times of syzygies) "as simple as possible, but not simpler". It is not relativity theory. It is a simplification of well-established ephemeris procedures, all the details are there on the Wiki page, and earlier this year I elaborated on some of the (apparently non-obvious) steps in response to someone who studied the page and found it interesting enough to want to understand it. Tom Peters 21:26, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps I should have mentioned that an implementation of this procedure has been online for some time. It is the new moon calculation for my 28/293 calendar at [3]. Unfortunately, I don't think all the code works properly in Firefox. Just click on a link on a new moon to see the calculations involved for that day. It uses a different epoc than Tom Peters' example, but that was just an example, as I see it, to help illustrate the discussion. Victor Engel 21:32, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I do not care about how long the implementation has been online. As long as it is a self-published website, it is not an appropriate scientific reference. Dr. Submillimeter 21:47, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

...which is why I haven't mentioned it until now, and only in the discussion page. I consider that calendar page just a pet project of mine.

• Delete. Original research does not belong in Wikipedia. I also found the article rather incoherent. How does this information interface with conventional astronomy? The motion of the moon is a time-honored topic in celestial mechanics, and you would expect a lot of references for something in this area. EdJohnston 21:14, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

• Keep; userfy original research unless independent publication can be verified: I am in favor of this material being kept, as it is encyclopedic, but the WP:OR argument can't be simply wished away. I don't want this material deleted, though, so as a compromise perhaps the questionable OR-ish material can be moved to the relevant user(s)' page space until the question can be more thoroughly discussed? Alba 01:42, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

• Strong keep. It's referenced. You'd have to show that the references do not cover the contents to get this deleted. Otherwise, your word stands against theirs. Samsara (talk • contribs) 11:47, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
  • I think the article makes it explicit where the references are used (three sentences in "Explanation" and some data for the table in "periodic corrections"). Tom, Karl, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the references cover the whole article. Gzkn 01:05, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
• Rewrite and remove all original research. Get original research published. Add back in original research and cite publication. --jaydj 06:24, 18 December 2006 (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.