Template talk:Infobox planet

Edit request 22 May 2026

Description of suggested change:

Currently, in the "proper elements" subsection of the infobox, "precession of perihelion" is needlessly ambiguous. Not only is there chance for confusion between "perihelion distance" and angular parameters relating to it, but there are multiple parameters in use that could be abbreviated perihelion: longitude of perihelion which is the direction an eccentric object's orbit is 'pointed' relative to the standard reference angle of Earth's position at the vernal equinox; and argument of perihelion which is measured relative to the object's longitude of ascending node. As someone who works with this frequently, it's obvious that this parameter is supposed to refer to the former (longitude of perihelion).

With that context out of the way, I would like to ask that the display for perihelion_rate parameter from its current "Precession of perihelion" to "Precession of perihelion longitude" or just [...]peri longitude / [...]perihelion long, if space is needed, as well as changing the link from the very generic apsis to longitude of periapsis. It's needlessly ambiguous otherwise to those not already highly familiar.

Original:

| label68     = {{longitem|Precession of [[Apsis|perihelion]]}}

Changed:

| label68     = {{longitem|Precession of [[longitude of periapsis|perihelion longitude]]}}

Alternative change 1:

| label68     = {{longitem|Precession of [[longitude of periapsis|perihelion long.]]}}

Alternative change 2:

| label68     = {{longitem|Precession of [[longitude of periapsis|peri. longitude]]}}

exoplanetaryscience (talk) 18:59, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

Because your requested wording would take up so much space, is there another way to approach this? Maybe change the link without changing the surface wording? Is there a common abbreviation that would work? — kwami (talk) 04:00, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

Just changing the link would be a good concession at least. I'm not sure there's a much more concise way to word it that gets the point across without being so abbreviated as to require clicking the link anyway. Personally I'm partial to "perihelion" -> "perihelion long", but if 5 more characters is too much then just changing the link would be fine too. exoplanetaryscience (talk) 00:57, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Done.

Because there are already 2 long words, adding "long." may cause it to spill over onto another line. Let's see how it works in practice. — kwami (talk) 01:02, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! Seems to work fine, as it's still shorter than "precession of the ascending node" which is both split over 3 lines and still ends up being longer on the third anyway. If wanting to save line breaks, it could probably be shortened to just ascending node (no "the"). exoplanetaryscience (talk) 16:15, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Abbreviated.

I think how many lines it has will depend on user prefs, so I went with "asc. node". Let me know if that doesn't work for you. — kwami (talk) 22:33, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Disabled mpc_name when minorplanet=yes

Please rv me if this causes problems I don't see.

This still works for moons etc., but for minor planets, with very few exceptions, it redundantly copies the infobox header. There are possibly thousands of articles where this adds a line to the infobox without adding any information.

It is also ill-defined, because there is no single MPC designation, apart from unnumbered objects that have only one provisional designation, where it isn't needed anyway.

The one place that I see where this provided some info was the 9 dwarf-planet articles where the MPC number is not use in the infobox header. But since number + name is not the MPC designation anyway, we can maybe just add those to the alt_names param.

If this isn't a good solution, we could run a bot to remove the entry from all mp articles, and restore it to those few where it's doing something. — kwami (talk) 03:58, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

Edit request 30 May 2026

Description of suggested change: Add the “Life Likelihood” parameter to help humans find a new planet to live on someday. ~2026-29052-60 (talk) 15:47, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

 Not done: please make your requested changes to the template's sandbox first. See WP:TESTCASES. I have removed the {{textdiff}} and everything that it encloses; it is for showing text differences, not markup differences. Also, your suggestion is difficult to follow and impossible to test. Please prototype template changes using the sandbox, as explained at WP:TESTCASES. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:07, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 18 July 2026

I have implemented a new type= parameter in the sandbox that overrides with a value from {{astro color}} if it is set. The American-English alias bgcolor= was also added for the background color. The default background color is the same as before, as well as the value set for exoplanets by {{astro color}}. See also Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Astronomy#Actual_implementation. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 23:24, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

 Completed – please update /doc page as needed. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. – welcome! – 02:29, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

To editor LaundryPizza03: your final ifeq function is throwing an error at the top of the #All parameters section. That might confuse editors, so it should be clearly explained under that error message, don't you think? P.I. Ellsworth , ed. – welcome! – 23:06, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

Can you create a tracking category for this error? –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 23:14, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

Tracking category created. I agree with Paine that visible errors are more for things that are broken rather than tracking bad use. Primefac (talk) 22:32, 23 July 2026 (UTC)