User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1272640-20170104044813/@comment-188432-20170105224319

Before we get too far afield, the topic of the thread is about whether short stories deserve their own prefix, SHORT.

As SOTO has already pointed out, there's no reason to do so.

Pluto2 said: I know we simplified prefixes a few years ago. I'm not asking to undo that, at all. But you are. You're asking for a technically complicated, multi-hour (maybe even multi-day) bot run which would discover which stories are now classed SHORT and to replace PROSE with SHORT in those cases, and only those cases.

You're also asking for us to untangle what has been merged for years. There are many instances where people may have mixed together short stories, novelas and novels into a single citation. So you might have (PROSE: Short story, Novela, Novel) A fairly sophisticated bot run would have to be created in order to create (SHORT: Short story; PROSE: Novela, Novel)

The bot run made back in the day never contemplated the idea of somehow returning to a separation of prose styles. It was meant to be permanent. There was a reasonable discussion period then and a very long time was taken to create the bots necessary to accomplish it. No markers were put in place that a bot could now look for and use. The act of separating them now is legitimately difficult.

Besides which, all media are equal here, so this distinction being proposed is really quite against the spirit of the wiki. Whether a thing came from a short story or a novel is completely immaterial to its validity as a source -- and PROSE and SHORT are solely about sourcing.

So we won't be doing this.