Talk:Diurnal cycle

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 14 January 2021 and 5 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Pcolon7. Peer reviewers: Leah.I.H..

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:10, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Definition of diurnal cycle

The article refers to the diurnal cycle as 'A diurnal cycle is any pattern that recurs every 24 hours as a result of one full rotation of the Earth[1] around its own axis.'

However, this definition is better refered to as the 'diel cycle'. 'Diurnal' is the antonym of 'nocturnal' i.e day and night, and confusion can occur when we refer to 24 hour periods as daily cycles, just as it would if we refered to them as nightly cycles.

Everything in the article is related and relevant to the topic. The only thing that distracted me was the overuse of hyperlinks for some underlying events related to the diurnal cycle but definitely not the main focus of the article. I believe the article is well done, I see that the information is brief yet straight to the point, therefore, there could be some minor additions to this article, for example, further lengthen the information on the semi-diurnal cycle. The tone of the article seems neutral and informative. There aren't any big claims or viewpoints that are overrepresented.Pcolon7 (talk) 21:24, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

@Pcolon7: so it appears that in one sense you are right, in that diel cycle may be the technically accurate name for the phenomenon this article describes. However, Wikipedia's policy is to use the most common name a subject is referred to with. (More specifically, the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources).) From what I'm seeing, it looks like diurnal cycle is also an acceptable name for this phenomenon, and the use of diel cycle is more limited in common parlance. Google scholar for instance, returns 10x more hits for "diurnal cycle."

I've added the diel cycle name to the article lede, and created a redirect at Diel cycle

As far as linking, that is part of the conventions of wikis in general, including Wikipedia. You can see our Manual of Style page on linking and feel free to adjust anything to fall more in line with the guideline.

I also removed your "disputed" tag from the section header here, since 1) Those are for the article page, rather than the talk page, and 2) It sounds like your dispute is over the article title, which is called a move, not over factual accuracy which the tag is designed for. MarginalCost (talk) 12:09, 20 March 2021 (UTC)