Talk:Moon

Refs added

In accordance with this article's FAR, I have added 66 citations, but it's not enough. The "Observation" section requires a book to properly cite its information and I do not intend to spend the rest of my natural life blindly scanning books for the relevant information. So unless anyone knows of a book containing all the relevant information, I'm done. Serendi^podous 12:04, 23 September 2026 (UTC) @Z1720:, @Nsae Comp:, @Lunokhod:, @Nimbus227:, @Sbznpoe: @Johnjbarton:

Ya know, not to be greedy, but at the very least, a "Thank you" would be nice. Serendi^podous 22:27, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Great work 👍 IlkkaP (talk) 03:35, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Mythology section

Yes OK, Artimis/Diana is notable. But if we're going to mention one Moon god, what about all the others? I've subbed the intro to lunar deity instead. Serendi^podous 22:11, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

Typographical Error - Structure Section

First paragraph of the structure section contains this sentence: "It a solid iron-rich inner core...". This does not read correctly and should be amended. ~2026-56158-92 (talk) 12:09, 20 October 2026 (UTC)

Fixed - Special-T (talk) 12:24, 20 October 2026 (UTC)

Featured article review

Moon is listed on Wikipedia:Featured article review. The citation issue is, I believe largely resolved. The size remains an issue. I cut down the section on Volcanism, attempting leave the main points with the rest in the Main article Volcanism on the Moon. The section "Exploration of the Moon" is almost an inclusion of Exploration of the Moon. If it were converted to a WP:SUMMARY this article would have an appropriate size. Johnjbarton (talk) 04:43, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

As long as no information was lost in the cutdown; you didn't add anything to Volcanism on the Moon. Serendi^podous 07:48, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Volcanism on the Moon seems pretty comprehensive and I didn't find anything in Moon that was significantly different. Did I fail? Johnjbarton (talk) 16:12, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

@Randy Kryn this topic was part of my motivation for removing "Theories of formation". I also thought it was out of place with no other history on the moon theories covered. I found the paragraph wonderfully concise so I am not against moving it to the second paragraph of Formation and ignoring that is it history.

However we are still very far from FA's word count "limit" (11,000 ish). Yes, this is an arbitrary limit etc, but I think it almost always makes sense to let details live in articles closer to their topic. I know that cutting content is always very painful.

Which brings me back to "Exploration of the Moon". It is 2400 words and duplicates Exploration of the Moon in large part. And this does not count "Human interaction") By the nature of the content it can't be excerpted easily: each section is essentially a list (regions of the world, lists of missions). Would cutting each section down to a paragraph be reasonable? A very short section has two advantages: readers who really want the content will visit the main article and this article structure will be clearer.

We can weed the article for items like "The first Earthlings, two tortoises, had circled the Moon three months earlier on the Soviet Union's Zond 5, followed by turtles on Zond 6", cool but would not make my list of essential facts about the Moon. However these items don't always have a natural main article to land in. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:38, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Johnjbarton, over the past couple of weeks you've cut long-term information without discussion, and wanting to edit-out the Zond 5 mission would remove a major historical event of human interaction with the Moon. That intent by itself shows that the many cuts and edits which have been made should be closely reviewed by other editors. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:18, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

I welcome your ideas on what to cut. Johnjbarton (talk) 01:39, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Why cut anything? Each section is defining of either a feature of the Moon, its relationship with the planet Earth, or its relationship with humans and their cultures. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:44, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

This is a WP:Featured Article, a status granted to articles which conform to certain criteria and which pass an extensive and painful review involving a number of editors. In my opinion, the effort by past editors is an implicit consensus to keep this article at FA. Over time edits may erode the article and cause it to lose the status. This article is at risk solely because of its length. (We've likely fixed the other problems, or are at least close).

Each section of this article could be expanded with even more content and your claim about each section would still be true. Where to stop? An encyclopedia should not have entries copying the content of every other entry it is related to. Rather, each entry should be concise and refer, by wiki-links and {{main}} links, to other entries. Each entry should have enough information about subtopic entries to encourage readers to explore without requiring them to wade through content they are not interested at this time. This is Wp:Summary style.

I should not have said "cut" but rather what content should be moved into other pages. (I'm always against cutting sourced content) Based on my reading the content in "Exploration of the Moon" already exists in Exploration of the Moon. We don't need it here. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:33, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Feature status is a prize, not an encyclopedic term that needs to be obtained or defended. By saying that human exploration of the Moon is not needed on the Moon page seems, in a nutshell, what's wrong with that summary style. Of course the history of Earth's residents in exploring their neighbor astronomical body is important for the page, that exploration is where much of the other information comes from. Makes little difference if an article already exists, summarizing it here as it is now meets the summary threshold without losing key and important data. Randy Kryn (talk) 08:10, 24 October 2026 (UTC)