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Forums > Senate Hall archive > SH:Merging Planet and Moon infoboxes into a CelestialBody one
Hello, all. Right now, we have a {{Planet}} infobox template and a {{Moon}} infobox template. The difference between them is that the Planet one has the fields
|suns=|position=(for orbital position)|moons=|xyz=(for x, y, z coordinates)|distance=(from the Core)
whereas the Moon one has an |orbited= field, for indicating the planet that a moon is orbiting.
(There's another difference in that the |population= field is located in different places on those templates, but that's not really relevant here.)
What ThePedantry has kindly pointed out on the Discord the other day is that we stand to benefit from merging the two templates into one, a CelestialBody infobox template. I know we rarely merge infoboxes and this is a change to status quo, but please bear with me. :P
These are some of the arguments in favor of doing so:
- Right now, there's a widespread status article precedent for using the Planet infobox for celestial bodies of unspecified type, i.e. locations that we have reason to suspect are probably planets or moons or such, but where the sources do not provide such confirmation. The reason why we're going with the Planet infobox is that it provides more granular astrographical fields (like region, sector, grid square) than the generic {{Location}} infobox does. But the problem is that this is not very easy for a newcomer to know - if you look at Category:Astrographical infobox templates there's no "generic" celestial body infobox, so it's not readily apparent that the Planet one is arguably the way to go.
- The above also applies to celestial bodies of a specified type (such as asteroid fields) for which we do not have dedicated templates - those generally also use the Planet infobox for the same reason and with the same ensuing problem.
- Star Wars isn't limited to moons orbiting planets:
To me, it seems like a fairly simple solution to this would be to have, instead of Planet and Moon infoboxes, a single CelestialBody infobox, which would have the following fields (notice the insertion of the "orbited" field) and would be used on articles on planets, moons, and other celestial bodies for which we do not already have a specific template:
|suns=|orbited=|position=|moons=|xyz=|distance=
Thoughts? Imperators II(Talk) 16:22, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
Discuss
- NBDani
(they/them)Yeager's Repairs 16:29, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
- Per Dani. Articles on astronomical bodies that go out of their way to avoid using the term "planet" or "world" but also use the Planet infobox have always confused me. Merging it to something that is more flexible for outlier cases would also be good. OOM 224 17:06, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
- Makes sense. Wok142 (talk) 17:21, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
- I naturally support this. One thing I would suggest adding is a type field where we can specify if its a moon, planet, comet, asteroid field, ect. If it is known. - ThePedantry (talk) 19:34, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
- Well, we could just note that in the already existing
|class=field. Imperators II(Talk) 20:04, 3 February 2025 (UTC)- That works as long as we can capture that info somewhere. - ThePedantry (talk) 22:50, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
- Well, we could just note that in the already existing
- We could have a field for natural satellites (moons, rings, asteroids, etc.) and another for artificial satellites (space stations). —DKS MaXoO (talk) 17:24, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
- For the record, status article precedent is to just list the latter in the "points of interest" field with an (in orbit) note. Imperators II(Talk) 17:44, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
- If/When this goes forward we should probably update the stub templates (Template:Ast-stub, Template:Moon-stub and Template:Planet-stub) to redirect to a new celestial body-stub. - ThePedantry (talk) 05:51, 23 February 2025 (UTC)
- Having only just started experimenting with DPL here, I'd like to say that the separate templates do indeed make complex search scenarios easier and allow for more specific output to narrow down errors across multiple pages at once and allow me to find and fix things quicker. I'd be hesitant to merge the templates at this stage as a result but maybe there are search parameters that I'm missing... Labyrinthine G0B-L1N (talk) 05:11, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- Hmm, I really don't think that's a good reason why those infoboxes should remain separate. Not all planet or moon articles are going to have infoboxes, so such a search method is imperfect at best. Really, it should be the job of our CategoryIntersection tool (to see it in action if you haven't yet, enable it in your Preferences and then head to any category page) and/or could also have the top-level category "Planets" and "Moons" added to all the applicable articles. Imperators II(Talk) 07:25, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- Please don't let my comment hinder any progress here. I was just putting it out there for consideration. On a related note: one thing I have noticed that could also be addressed together with this is naming consistency across all Infobox templates. I have experienced some setbacks due to some infobox Templates having differing names for the exact same field. For example, some Templates use "coord" while others "coordinates" and this does seem to impact on DPLs limited ability to parse output in some scenarios... I'd also suggest either "coords"/"grid" (for traditional Atlas-type Grid Square notation) and also "xyz" as it seems that it is becoming more common for Disney-canon sources to sneak in xyz coordinates (there even seems to be some correlation between some of the official xyz coordinates matching placements on Modi's maps; at least the "xy" component anyway. Oh, for the ever-elusive "z" coordinate...) Labyrinthine G0B-L1N (talk) 10:27, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- That's a good point, I'll put it onto my to-do list. :) Imperators II(Talk) 20:08, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- Please don't let my comment hinder any progress here. I was just putting it out there for consideration. On a related note: one thing I have noticed that could also be addressed together with this is naming consistency across all Infobox templates. I have experienced some setbacks due to some infobox Templates having differing names for the exact same field. For example, some Templates use "coord" while others "coordinates" and this does seem to impact on DPLs limited ability to parse output in some scenarios... I'd also suggest either "coords"/"grid" (for traditional Atlas-type Grid Square notation) and also "xyz" as it seems that it is becoming more common for Disney-canon sources to sneak in xyz coordinates (there even seems to be some correlation between some of the official xyz coordinates matching placements on Modi's maps; at least the "xy" component anyway. Oh, for the ever-elusive "z" coordinate...) Labyrinthine G0B-L1N (talk) 10:27, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
- Hmm, I really don't think that's a good reason why those infoboxes should remain separate. Not all planet or moon articles are going to have infoboxes, so such a search method is imperfect at best. Really, it should be the job of our CategoryIntersection tool (to see it in action if you haven't yet, enable it in your Preferences and then head to any category page) and/or could also have the top-level category "Planets" and "Moons" added to all the applicable articles. Imperators II(Talk) 07:25, 4 March 2025 (UTC)