Talk:History of Earth

Milankovitch cycles

This article fails to mention Milankovitch cycles, and may need an entire section on them. LightProof1995 (talk) 06:15, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 27 October 2022

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. Arbitrarily0 ^(talk) 00:06, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

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History of Earth → Earth history – However preferred 'History of X' may be as a style on Wikipedia, this page title just reads strangely with respect to reliable sources. This is commonly known as "Earth history", in every major university in the English language world (by a wide margin), just as the science is "Earth science". Even were the current title preferred, 'History of the Earth' would surely have read better. But in any case, Ngrams shows the gap in the actual usage. Then, if we move onto scholarly results, a search for "History of Earth" yields 13,700 raw results, and several early hits for this are not applicable. The fourth result I see is Geophagia: the history of earth-eating. Some other results use the chain of words 'history of earth', but as part of the phrase 'history of earth science', reinforcing the 'earth science' and 'earth history' phraseology. 'Earth history' has 205,000 raw results by comparison, and there are no results on the initial pages not clearly about 'earth history'. Iskandar323 (talk) 15:30, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

• Comment. Well, "History of the Earth" is at least as common and maybe slightly more common than "Earth History" based on the Google Ngrams. And "Earth" and "the Earth" are really just two different ways of writing about the planet we call Earth. However, we don't use the definite article before any other planets (such as Geological history of Mars), so for consistency I think dropping the article in titles like this with Earth in it is fine to do. But if people really want to move the article to History of the Earth I would be open to that. Rreagan007 (talk) 17:25, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

  If we Scholar that term too, we get around 56,000 hits, but most of the prominent ones seem to be from the 20th century (some earlier), rather than recent scholarship. A search of 2022 hits gives us 1,300 hits for "History of the Earth", 498 hits for "History of Earth", and 3,250 hits for "Earth history". The academic term preference appears consistent. Iskandar323 (talk) 18:00, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

  Geological history of Mars incidentally has its pairing in Geological history of Earth. But this article really lacks a direct parallel of quite the same ilk - the point being I'm not sure we should be looking at achieving consistency when there are no directly paralleled articles to be consistent with, and when the field has a clear scholarly name, if not common name. Iskandar323 (talk) 18:04, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

  (Well, I'm averse to adding in a "THE" into the title, as it should be consistent with the many other article titles that use "of Earth".) Paintspot Infez (talk) 00:26, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose. "Earth history" sounds bizarre. If it is first, then it should be in possessive form "Earth's history" (e.g. we say "German history" not "Germany history"), or else leave it in the object ("History of Germany"). I would support the inclusion of "the" in the current title. Otherwise it sounds like the history of dirt. Walrasiad (talk) 04:31, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

  @Walrasiad: Ironically, I thought 'History of Earth' sounded like the dirt, capitalisation notwithstanding. However, I assure you that 'earth history' is the prevalent name for the field, as any source analysis will attest, so why avoid using the actual language used for the field? What I haven't figured out yet is if there is some sort of geographical divide on this. Iskandar323 (talk) 07:53, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

It's still grammatically incorrect, and grates my ears. Anyway, we're not naming an academic department, we're looking for an article title understandable to general readers. "History of the Earth" is most straightforward and clear. Walrasiad (talk) 20:03, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose. The fact that university departments are called 'Earth history' is irrelevant. A department would be called 'German history' as a category, but a book or web page would be called History of Germany. I would support a change to 'History of the Earth' as discussed above because the current title is ambiguous and could mean history of dirt. Avoiding ambiguity is more important than consistency with other article titles. Dudley Miles (talk) 15:29, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

  I said it was the prevalent subject name in scholarly sources, not a department name. Just a 'history department' is what would cover German history. Iskandar323 (talk) 16:09, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

• My point stands that 'Earth history' makes sense as a topic, not a title of a book or article. There is a book called A Brief History of Earth, none called Earth History. Dudley Miles (talk) 20:38, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose per above. History of X is the default way to title such articles on Wikipedia, so gets a nod on WP:CONSISTENCY grounds, and I'm not convinced that Earth history is truly the commonly used term for exactly this topic. Certainly it sounds odd to my ears in this context, just as it does above. I get the impression from looking at Google results that "Earth history" is more of a specialist name referring to geological study, rather than the broader topic we have here.  — Amakuru (talk) 22:12, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Semi-protected edit request on 2 December 2022

Change "cloesely" to "closely". 2804:D49:8270:8100:88CD:D1CD:AD0:7938 (talk) 14:53, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for pointing this out. Dudley Miles (talk) 15:08, 2 December 2022 (UTC)