Forum:Inline citing vs. footnotes

Forum: The Situation Room > Inline citing vs. footnotes

After the great job we did on the Live Another Day production section, I've been thinking it might make sense to start doing the same for the in-universe articles as well. The current cite template is fine, but there's a lot of cases where you have a lot of varied sources in the same sentence or paragraph - Jack's early life, for example - and it looks pretty bad to have a giant episode title after every sentence. Also, with footnotes, it's much easier to add on notes for a particular source, where it isn't immediately clear what part of the episode the info comes from. Some examples here, here, and here. Some pages will have a lot of references at the end, but we can just use a scrolling box like on the Live Another Day page. It will take a little doing with the bot, but it shouldn't be too hard to convert, if we want. I made a new template for it here that should map over pretty easily, as long as a {{reflist}} is added at the end of each page. --Pyramidhead (talk) 23:14, June 4, 2014 (UTC)

This is a tough one - because for articles for people who have multiple different sources for their biographical information (like major characters or real world things mentioned a few times), the reflist system seems good. But, for what is (I believe) the majority of articles, where the info comes purely from one or more consecutive episodes of one season, then it's much more preferable (I think) to use the inline citing where you can see at a glance that each paragraph comes from a certain episode and describes the events from that episode. Seeing [1], [2], etc and having to click on each one to see what episode is being talked about is less desirable for those situations. So I am undecided at what is best as a standard--Acer4666 (talk) 17:04, June 17, 2014 (UTC)

I hear you. It's true that a lot of pages are just N episodes in a row, summarized, but even then I think it might be better to just present the content without an episode title every few words. You can see the start and end of their "arc" in the sidebar and then the appearances section, so it gets a bit tiresome to read "2:00-3:00," "3:00-4:00", etc. - that's what you get with such monotonous episode titles! Plus, in theory, any article could suddenly be expanded with new information - we just saw that with Alicia - so even if inline makes sense at the moment, it seems sensible to use footnotes just to have the system in place. --Pyramidhead (talk) 21:27, June 18, 2014 (UTC)

Bump! Another bonus would be getting rid of all these one-item background information sections that are popping up with the HD episodes - I can't speak for everyone, but I think it's more useful to immediately be able to jump down and see where exactly someone's full name came from, like on this page. --Pyramidhead (talk) 18:28, July 7, 2014 (UTC)

I can't say I'm for this change: I don't see how [1], [2], is less monotonous/tiresome to read than "2:00-3:00," "3:00-4:00", especially when you have to constantly refer to the bottom of the page to understand what the [1], [2] refers to, whereas the episode titles are instantly obvious. It seems to be obscuring that information more. Also, I often open up links in a new tab while I read an article, and often do so using the cited episodes, but having to click twice rather than once to follow a link to an episode is definitely making things more awkward. As I say I think the majority of pages would suffer rather than improve from this change.

As for the name thing - I see there a references section with two different links to the same episode, which looks odd, and also I don't see how having a "references" section with an explanation is such a huge difference to having a "background information and notes" section with the explanation.--Acer4666 (talk) 00:17, July 8, 2014 (UTC)