Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-3030984-20130109133452/@comment-188432-20130602161457

Nope, not forgotten about it, but a bit overwhelmed with the workload from the active season. We do need to get back in on this.

Yeah I think we will have to force prefixes by way of an SMW #set. If this doesn't automatically take the decision of which prefix to use out of the hands of the user, there's not much point in it.

It's gotta work like you have at w:c:eladkse:Doctor Who:, and then the template figures out what to do with it.

HOMEVID and NOTVALID are a problem, yah, since is based upon, thus revolving solely around the dab term.

So I guess there are two choices that I can think of.

One is to build a second switch to put at the top of in which we check the whole name of the page against a list of the (relatively few) things that use HOMEVID and NOTVALID. If it falls through both of those then we nest the existing #switch in the #default line of this proposed new #switch, and Bob's yer uncle.

So, roughly it'd be something like this: {{#ifeq: {{#switch:{{PAGENAME}} }} Course this method would require maintenance by admin to add new stories as they came in, and it's probably not as elegant as just #setting something on the page. The only — only, he says! — problem with the #setting method is that it would be incredibly vulnerable to attack.
 * Exile (audio story)
 * et al = NOTDWU
 * First Night (TV story)
 * et al = HOMEVID
 * default = current contents of {{DW/find}}

So the #setting has to be done within a template that can be locked. But how do you get it so that the template can recognise what kind of page it's on? Maybe you only need to #set it in the cases of these things that are not prefixed by dab term. So maybe you create a #switch in the infobox code that checks the PAGENAME against a list of story names, and if it finds the right name it #sets medium=NOTDWU.

Sorry for the stream of consciousness, but I'm trying to solve a regex puzzler at the same time. Hope there was something there of use.

Anyway, broad agreement that we need to pick this project up again and get it implemented. Current system is a stumbling block for new users, and if we can work out the few exceptions you've noted then we're probably good to go.

Oh, just thought: if we figure out the exceptions for these two, then we might be able to use it for REF works. Or we might then be able to add (non-fiction) as a dab term, and avoid exceptions altogether. Since we'll be making it easier to cite those works, adding a bit to their names nets in fewer keystrokes for the editor.

Ugh, sorry again for the stream-of-consciousness.