PickiPedia:Firehose demo
A working demonstration of Template:Firehose, which embeds a live list of podcast episodes anywhere on the wiki.
Only a handful of episode pages exist so far — five, created as a pilot — so these lists are short. The point is the mechanism, not the volume.
Everything, newest first
This is what would go on the front page.
{{Firehose|limit=5}}
One show
This is what would go on a podcast's own page, showing its back catalogue.
{{Firehose|show=Grass Talk Radio}}
One subject
This is the one that matters. On any page — a musician, a band, a festival, a tune — {{Firehose|topic={{PAGENAME}}}} lists every episode the podcast world has made about it.
{{Firehose|topic=Jason Carter}}
Nothing to show
A firehose with no matching episodes says so rather than rendering an empty box.
{{Firehose|topic=Bill Monroe}}
How it works
Episodes are ordinary wiki pages using Template:PodcastEpisode, which records the podcast, the air date, the episode link and its subjects as semantic properties. A firehose is an #ask query over those properties, so anyone can write one — the template is a convenience, not a gatekeeper.
Subjects are recorded with Has topic, one property covering people, bands, festivals, tunes and places alike. That generality is deliberate. An episode title gives up proper nouns without saying what kind of thing each one is, or whether the named party turned up in the room or was only discussed — and claiming somebody was a guest when the episode merely talked about them would put a false statement on their page. An episode can carry as many topics as it mentions, and each of them gets the episode back.
Has guest still exists, declared a subproperty of Has topic, for the day that distinction is worth drawing. Nothing would need rewriting.
Topics are linked individually, and a name with no page yet becomes a redlink. Those redlinks are useful: they are a worklist of who and what the bluegrass podcast world talks about that PickiPedia has no page for, ranked by how often it comes up.
