Template talk:Infobox body of water

Short description generated is never optimal

The short description “Body of water” is awful, practically useless, and makes WP look less encyclopedic to casual readers.

Can the template instead generate something like “type in location” from the parameters?

I’m not making a formal edit request just yet as I’m not sure if that’s the best alternative.

RadioactiveBoulevardier (talk) 05:34, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Can you please give a few examples where "Body of water" is "awful" and "useless", failing to meet the purposes of a short description?

If you find an article for which "Body of water" is a bad short description (SD), it is trivial to override the SD that the infobox provides by adding a {{short description}} template at the top of the article with more appropriate content. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:53, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

I am arguing that it is never very useful for readers, and undermines WP’s quality and encyclopedic nature.

Furthermore, if an article is missing a short description entirely, it is somewhat more likely to attract editor attention.

What I’m suggesting is that a more specific shortdesc could be automatically generated from the parameters already in the template, say “type” and “location” -> e.g. “Endorheic lake in Graustark Region, Ruritania”

RadioactiveBoulevardier (talk) 19:49, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

Two issues with your suggestion —-

• |type= is only used on about 1/3 of the infoboxes
• |type= is not always a noun phrase, and sometimes has extraneous wiki markup (see, e.g., Utah Lake)

— hike395 (talk) 00:11, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Module:Type in location deals with most of those kinds of issues. --Trialpears (talk) 09:43, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, Trialpears! That is a very handy module. We could add it to this infobox. — hike395 (talk) 13:33, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

I can’t even figure out what to edit in the sandbox. Where is Template:Auto short description even transcluded?

Should I make an edit request even though I can’t figure out exact code to propose, per WP:IAR and WP:BOLD? RadioactiveBoulevardier (talk) 18:28, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Take a look at {{Infobox hospital}}, {{Infobox shopping mall}}, {{Infobox museum}}, {{Infobox dam}}, and {{Infobox airport}} for examples. The full list is here. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:51, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Added call to Module:Type in location to the sandbox, ptal. — hike395 (talk) 19:49, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Can we merge the change from sandbox? RadioactiveBoulevardier (talk) 21:50, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

 Done —— see Category:Pages using infobox body of water with auto short description for the articles where this is working. — hike395 (talk) 01:37, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Are you sure it’s working? I don’t see any difference. RadioactiveBoulevardier (talk) 00:13, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Ameenpur Lake has the auto SD "Artificial lake in Hyderabad" that is generated from the infobox. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:23, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Every other example I found doesn’t though. RadioactiveBoulevardier (talk) 22:16, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

OK, I'll click on a couple more random ones. Anacoco Lake says "Reservoir in Louisiana, US". Backstairs Passage says "Strait in South Australia". When you are reporting a problem, always provide a link to a page where the problem is occurring. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:05, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Huh, it seems to be working perfectly now. I don’t remember which pages I had originally tried but it was five or six randomly chosen ones. RadioactiveBoulevardier (talk) 18:26, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Should we add a new parameter of Date_Drained?

There is already a useful Date_Flooded parameter which shows when the body of water came into existence. However there is nothing to show when it ceased to exist.

I have been studying lakes for the last 3 years and have found many examples in wikipedia of 'Ancient' lakes, lakes which have dried out or are about to dry out (e.g. Aral Sea) or where the dam has broken. Sadly the instances of lakes drying out is increasing due to manmade interference with the water supply to the lake, and/or global warming increasing evaporation. There are also cases, especially with glacial lakes and landslide lakes, where the 'natural' dam has broken naturally or been broken by man in the name of safety to downstream places.

There are also many examples of Reservoirs where the manmade dam has broken. (e.g. Sanford Lake) While it could be argued that these should have used 'Infobox dam' instead of this Infobox, it is a fact that about 80% of the reservoir articles actually use this 'Infobox body of water', so the argument for adding this new parameter holds for them as well, just on saving the sheer amount of effort to changing thousands of article to use a different infobox.

If others agree with this suggestion, it would seem a very simple and safe parameter to add as it would not affect any existing article?MWchat (talk) 11:20, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

Agree I'm writing my first article (Draft:Diebsteich) about a former mill pond (one that is mostly relevant as it has a train station named after it, though it has some historical importance on its own). I was indeed looking for such a field as we have a decent idea when it was drained, and I'd be in support of the addition of such a field. Aveaoz (talk) 15:36, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 16 November 2023

I suggest that |native_name= be moved to the subheader. It makes little sense for it to be all the way in the body, completely separate from the name by the image and the location parameters. Đại Việt quốc (talk) 22:07, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

 Done. Note that other infoboxes I checked are inconsistent about this. If anyone else feels strongly that this should be reverted, feel free to ping me and I'll do so. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 02:28, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

mapframe location at the bottom

This has been like that since the initial implementation. I'm guessing the reason is that the existing map fields are up to image4 and image5 wouldn't work. (I saw that in another case). Regardless, it'd be more logical to convert all the map-related image parameters to data parameters and group them together. --Joy (talk) 20:59, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

I looked at the code in Module:Infobox, and I don't see why |image5= would fail. It should work with arbitrarily numbered arguments. I would suggest giving it a try. — hike395 (talk) 23:44, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Zoom issue with mapframe?

@Joy: This infobox might be suffering the same zoom issue as {{Infobox river}}, because currently the mapframe doesn't know how big the body of water is. I just set the mapframe type to be "waterbody", which should set the default to be dim=20km (1:100000 scale). Are we seeing any scaling issues? Do we need to add |length_km=, |width_km=, and |area_km2= to the template, analogous to {{Infobox river}}? — hike395 (talk) 16:20, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

Later --- looking at the test cases, unlike {{Infobox river}}, the mapframe does not turn on by default. I suspect we don't need to make sure that the zoom is correctly set, because if someone opts into the mapframe, they'll manually set the zoom. — hike395 (talk) 16:23, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

Yep, we should do the same migration to split dimensions. No reason not to have a nice zoom after simply enabling mapframe = yes, forcing editors to think about these convoluted zoom levels by default is pretty bad design. --Joy (talk) 09:04, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 19 September 2025 – adding "color" attribute to abovestyle parameter to address Lint errors

While addressing old Linter errors, I see that {{Infobox body of water}} is contributing to some of the "Background color inline style rule w/o text color" errors due to the abovestyle parameter having the "background" attribute defined without a corresponding "color" attribute. Please add "; color:black;" to the parameter as follows:

−

| abovestyle = background-color: #cedeff; font-size: 125%;

+

| abovestyle = background-color: #cedeff; font-size: 125%; color:black;

This should help resolve a number of inherited Lint errors in articles and related templates.

Thanks! – SirOlgen (talk) 02:28, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

 Completed. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. – welcome! – 05:35, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Infobox convert

Is there a reason that Module:ConvertIB and its associate {{convinfobox}} has never been implemented here? I know that there is Category:Pages using infobox body of water with a non-automatically converted dimension. I actually monitor that category which is how I realized this was an issue. Could really simplify things moving forward if it were implemented... Happy to take on that task unless there is a reason it has never been done. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 01:30, 5 October 2025 (UTC)

I was thinking about taking this on, because it could set the mapframe zoom value to good values (see, e.g., Gulf of California). Someone would have to do an AWB run to convert parameters like |length= to |length_km= to make that happen. — hike395 (talk) 04:24, 5 October 2025 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 26 May 2026

The label for the "oceans" parameter is malformed. Right now the template is showing "display: inline-block; line-height: 1.2em; padding: .1em 0; width: 100%;".

I fixed it in the sandbox: there was an unescaped equals sign in the value to {{longitem}}.

−

{{longitem|<span title="Primary outflows: oceans, seas, straights">Ocean/sea sources</span>}}

+

{{longitem|1=<span title="Primary outflows: oceans, seas, straights">Ocean/sea sources</span>}}

For good measure, I escaped two other equals signs even though the syntax happened to work.

Please apply these changes to the template.

Thanks — W.andrea (talk) 22:05, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

BTW, the fact that {{Longitem}} is producing that text seems to be undocumented. I asked about it on the talk page there. — W.andrea (talk) 22:46, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

 Done * Pppery * _{in solidarity} 23:27, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Pushpin map cleanup

As part of a larger refactor of Module:Location map, I will be refactoring the way that this Infobox calls the location map code. The only noticeable change for most will be that the parameter names related to the pushpin maps will now all start with |pushpin_...=. This is part of a larger effort to make things consistent across Infoboxes. When this is done, ALL infoboxes using pushpin maps will use the same parameters. For more information about this, please see this post. As part of this cleanup, I am also going to resolving any conflicting parameters that I can find and cleaning up parameter names that fail to conform to MOS:INFOBOXNAME. Note that this follows a long list of similar clean ups that I have done on countless other Infoboxes. The parameters I plan to replace are the following:

Deprecate	Replace with
|coords=	|coordinates=
|pushpin_map_alt=	|pushpin_alt=
|pushpin_map_caption=	|pushpin_caption=
|pushpin_mapsize=	|pushpin_map_size=
|parent=	|part_of=
|basin_countries=	|countries=
|cities=	|settlements=
|date-built=	|date_built=
|date-flooded=	|date_flooded=
|max-depth=	|max_depth=

Please chime in below with any questions, comments or concerns about this cleanup. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 03:46, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

I see that you've gone ahead and run this, which seems to have caused some flow on errors. I've been working through the cleanup list for WPNZ, and we now have nearly 300 articles showing up in Category:Articles using infobox body of water without pushpin map alt and being tripped for not having alt text on the pushpin map despite having that text under the new parameter name. If you could please make sure that you're updating the criteria for the maintenance categories as you're going to make it easier on others that would be great, cheers. Turnagra (talk) 18:49, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Please link to an example article with this problem. I picked a random article in the category, Loch Achall, and it doesn't have an alt parameter value for the pushpin map. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:50, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Never mind, I found and fixed the problem. Affected articles will need to be null-edited to leave the category. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:55, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Just wanted to add here that I'm sorry for this foul up. Been offline all day. Appreciate Jonesey getting on this and tracking it down. This inofbox is an odd one because of the way it uses a custom module to track parameters. Sorry I missed that in my cleanup and thank you for calling it to my attention! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:08, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

There is still garbled text below the main image at McMillan Reservoir. How to fix this? Thx. Moreau1 (talk) 22:11, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 and Hike395: any idea wtf is going on with McMillan Reservoir?! There seems to be an issue with using the map data from USA District of Columbia... Changing to a different map fixes the problem... Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:37, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

Ok so I figured it out... {{Infobox body of water}} had |pushpin_relief=yes and there is no relief map for Module:Location map/data/USA District of Columbia. Hike395 I'm confused though because until I made this change I could not just set |pushpin_relief=0. I thought that you had explained to me previously that the change I made was not necessary. What am I missing? Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:48, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

A few things going on, let me explain in order:

• When you (Zackmann) converted templates over to use infobox_pushpin_map() in Module:Location map, you made it impossible to turn off the relief map.
  • The previous behavior of Module:Location map was that any non-empty value would be interpreted as a relief map. So code like | pushpin_relief = {{if empty|{{{pushpin_relief|}}}|1}} from {{Infobox body of water}} would always create a relief map: there was no way to turn it off.
• I think you (Zackmann) were expecting the module to handle arguments in the usual way, where "0/off/no/false" meant "please turn off relief maps". This is a perfectly reasonable expectation.
• Instead of changing the hundreds (?) of places where you cleaned up |pushpin_relief=, I thought it would be better to have the module conform to the expectation, so I made this edit.
• Unfortunately, there was a bug in this edit (do you see it?). I forgot to handle the case where relief maps were missing. In those cases, code returned a blank, which then had gibberish show up in infoboxes.
• After hundreds or thousands of pages caught on fire, I fixed the bug and now everything works correctly.
• You don't need to go back and change any template code: everything should work as expected. — hike395 (talk) 01:55, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

Oi vei. What a cluster. @Hike395: I really appreciate your detailed explanation of what went wrong, not to mention taking the time to track this down, diagnose it and fix the problem. Thanks for being on it! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 03:20, 1 August 2026 (UTC)