Wikijunior talk:Solar System/Venus

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Sources used:

• w:Venus (planet) -- General data
• [1] -- Weight data
• Atlas of the universe ISBN 0-540-06087-9 -venus facts
• Venus Revealed: A new look below the clouds of our mysterious twin planet (1997); Grinspoon, David Harry; ISBN 0-201-40655-1; Helix Books: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.

In both the Mercury and Venus articles, the lack of a moon is explained in the same way. I think it would make sense for Mercury to have the explanation, and Venus to refer to Mercury's explanation. The section about Venus' moon would still have content, due to the story of its fabled moon.

Mihoshi 02:19, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "Venus'" or "Venus's" as possessive

This goes back to my Senior year of high school (and English 101) where I wouldn't have swore that when you make a possessive out of a word that ends in the letter "s", you simply put the apostrophe on the end. Apparently I'm in an edit war over this with Laurascudder, so now I'm appealing to the community in general to decide this issue. This is like the name of the magazine Boys' Life (note the apostrophe on the end.) I guess to clarify things we could also simply use the term Venusian (as opposed to Venerial which is the correct term but usually not used in scientific circles to talk about things pertaining to Venus and only used in medical journals instead). --Rob Horning 02:43, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Technically the apostrophe only rule is only applicable when the s on the end is due to a plural. An example is that you write Texas's rather than Texas' because Texas is singular but boys' instead of boys's because boys is plural (See for instance University of Minnesota style guide). This is however a frequently confused rule. --Laura Scudder | Talk 18:55, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

I've seen (and myself use) constructions such as Texas' meaning "of Texas" along the lines of "two days' time" meaning "the time of two days". Would we write (or try to say) "two days's time"..? I'm not convinced the rule given in the University of Minnesota's style guide is generally considered to be a rule – but then I suppose there's no final arbiter to whom to appeal. So I'll just say that "Texas's" (and "Venus's", etc) looks odd to me!
Best wishes, David Kernow 15:12, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

K, if that's what you guys want, I'm not going to fight it. Let me just point out that there's ~400k instances of Texas's on the internet according to google. — Laura Scudder | Talk 16:02, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't know what the conclusion to this was, but I'm editing it as "Venus's" because this is what it is correct grammatically, rather than taking artistic license to make it anything else. In any case, the possessive form is definitely not "Venuses", which I had to edit it from. MiltonT 19:53, 6 October 2006 (UTC)