Do we look up the moon on full moon days?
Higher
Pageviews are a proxy for curiosity. Unusually for this site, the expected verdict here is "Higher" — which makes the boundary between what the moon can and cannot move unusually visible.
Views of "Supermoon"
- Baseline (same weekday & month average = 100)
- 100.0
- Full moon days (±24h)
- 430.0
- New moon days (±24h)
- 59.3
- Verdict for full moon days
- Higher
Views of "Lunar eclipse"
- Baseline (same weekday & month average = 100)
- 100.0
- Full moon days (±24h)
- 319.9
- New moon days (±24h)
- 132.9
- Verdict for full moon days
- Higher
Views of "Insomnia"
- Baseline (same weekday & month average = 100)
- 100.0
- Full moon days (±24h)
- 99.9
- New moon days (±24h)
- 99.7
- Verdict for full moon days
- No difference
Views of "Werewolf"
- Baseline (same weekday & month average = 100)
- 100.0
- Full moon days (±24h)
- 108.6
- New moon days (±24h)
- 98.7
- Verdict for full moon days
- Slightly higher
Data: 2015–2025, Wikimedia Pageviews API (bots excluded), 3,837 days
Act II: What sends us to the moon articles, more than the moon itself
What really moves the number is —
×367
On its biggest day (November 14, 2016), the "Supermoon" article ran about 367x its normal traffic; the top 1% of days average about 43.8x — and most of them are supermoon or eclipse news days. We look the moon up not just because we saw it, but because we read about it.
The other culprit is the calendar. The articles that reliably surface on full moon days in English Wikipedia are Vesak, Passover, and Guru Purnima — religious observances fixed to the full moon. Lunar calendars have been synchronizing human schedules to the full moon for thousands of years.
The moon moves neither earthquakes nor crashes — but it demonstrably moves human curiosity, and the calendar.
Where this topic came from: a reverse search of full-moon reading
This topic was built differently from the others. Instead of starting from a hypothesis, we reverse-searched Wikipedia's daily rankings for articles whose views spike on full moon days. We collected the daily "top 1000 most-read articles" (Japanese and English) for 24 months and mechanically looked for articles that surface disproportionately on full moon days (±24 hours).
Real signals stood out immediately. In English, the strongest full-moon skews belonged to "Supermoon" (4 of its 5 top-1000 appearances fell on full moon days), "Blue moon," and "Lunar eclipse" (a lunar eclipse can, by definition, only happen at full moon). In Japanese, "Strawberry moon." And then a surprising set of regulars: Vesak, Passover, Guru Purnima, the Mid-Autumn Festival — religious and seasonal observances fixed to the full moon. Through lunar calendars, the moon has been moving human schedules for thousands of years.
The trap, exhibit A: Zendaya is not the queen of the full moon
Here is the real point of this page. In the same scan, the Japanese-Wikipedia article with the highest full-moon-day view ratio among everyday top-1000 regulars was the pop artist Chanmina (×1.94). In English: Zendaya (×1.42) and the 2026 FIFA World Cup (×1.85). "On full moon days, people read about Zendaya 1.4 times as much" — you could draw a perfectly convincing chart.
It is, of course, coincidence. A few news cycles — concerts, casting announcements — happened to land on full moons during the scan window. Scan hundreds of thousands of articles at once and, like rolling hundreds of thousands of dice, chance alone guarantees a crop of "moon-correlated" articles (the multiple-comparisons problem). Claims about the moon and human behavior are riddled with exactly this kind of found-by-searching correlation; some of the folklore this site examines was probably born this way.
Which is why this page's verdict does not use the scan results directly:
- The scan (2 years) was used only to find candidates. The verdict is computed on separate data — roughly 10 years of full daily pageviews since July 2015. Correlations that were luck over 2 years dissolve over 10
- The article set was fixed before the re-measurement (moon articles: "Supermoon," "Lunar eclipse"; controls: "Insomnia," "Werewolf"). The two controls test different things. If "full moons ruin sleep" were a widely felt experience, "Insomnia" should rise — it didn't. "Werewolf," a control for curiosity about the legend, did rise slightly on full moon days. The moon, it seems, moves imagination rather than sleep
- Views exclude bots, and each day is indexed against the average for the same weekday and month (= 100), removing weekday and seasonal confounds (same method as the love-searches topic)
How this verdict is computed
- Data: daily pageviews from the Wikimedia Pageviews API (official, bots excluded), July 2015 through the end of last year
- Each article's expected value is the average for the same weekday × month; days are compared as observed ÷ expected
- Days are classified as full moon days (±24h around the instant) or new moon days using the moon age at local noon (JST / US Eastern); each group's mean index is compared with 100
See the methodology for the exact criteria.
Sources
- Wikimedia Pageviews API (CC0); the reverse scan used the same API's top endpoint (June 2024 – May 2026)
- Moon phase instants computed in-house from Jean Meeus, "Astronomical Algorithms" (UTC)
Last updated: June 12, 2026 16:56 UTC (rebuilt daily)