Module:RDIndex/doc

This module is responsible for making the Lua-based archive pages for the Refdesk at WP:Reference desk/Archives/Lua.

Usage
For all the recent archives like WP:Reference desk/Archives/Lua/Science/January 2013, it extracts the month, year, and desk from the title string if they are not otherwise specified. (The exact order doesn't matter; it does a text search) Therefore, these pages contain simply:

However, conventional parameter-based settings are available to override the defaults thus obtained - however, these haven't been tested much and may need debugging.

Parameters

 * cat = a specific category (as provided by the Template:Rdcat pseudo-template) can be specified here, in which case only the pages from that category will be indexed. Or it can be set to "no" and this column is omitted.
 * input = a text for the "main" function (not "month") to process
 * desk = (Science, Humanities, etc.)
 * label = (an arbitrary replacement for the desk to be shown in the table, if provided)
 * date = (the date to be shown, if not obtained from the page name)
 * arcpage = (the page where the original discussion is archived)

The Rdcat pseudo-template
Template:Rdcat doesn't do anything, because the text is read in by the module without template substitution - this module simply looks for and processes it on its own. The first parameter sets a category for display in the table; the second is reserved for a subcategory system within a system.

Categories are things like "biology", "chemistry", "astronomy", "physics", "engineering" under Science. The subcategories would be more specific topics, perhaps evolution, DNA, protein, taxonomy, virology, etc. under Biology. To make the categories and subcategories work it is well-nigh essential to recruit people interested in sorting the questions, and for them to do so pretty consistently.