Forum:References into Worldbuilding

Index → The Panopticon → References into Worldbuilding

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Opening post

Just a short one, this, but a good 'un.

On this Wiki, we have a section for references on source pages (not the academic kind, but a collection of in-universe elements with their own pages that are "referenced" in a given source). I dunno where this practise started, but today, you can see it on pages from Rose (TV story) to The North West Historical Society (feature) to The Lonely Assassins (video game). It is quite a good section, although, as evidenced inadvertently in Forum:Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes, perhaps not the most intuitively named.

In said Forum, after @Najawin highlighted the fact that he didn't understand the difference between the References and Continuity sections of articles, given that "references" generally is more akin to a list of citations outside of this Wiki; @Scrooge MacDuck stated that, to be more precise when he was building the Jenny Everywhere Wiki, he renamed the "References" section to "Worldbuilding".

So yeah, that's the proposal. Follow the Jenny Everywhere Wiki's suit and rename "References" into "Worldbuilding". It is more concise and illuminates the subsection's purpose effortlessly. This change wouldn't even be difficult to accomplish, it'd take just a bot sweep. Thoughts?

Discussion

Well, I wrote a section for this for my forthcoming R4bp post. (It's coming, it's coming, I promise. Almost done.) But briefly I don't believe this solves the issue in any way. See the comment I made at Forum:Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes just for the most obvious example of the problem.

Continuity is similar to the "references" section, really, except that it usually includes things of narrative significance.

I swear to God, I could not tell you what this means concretely. Quite frankly, I have no idea if I'm for or against this proposal because I don't understand what a continuity section is as opposed to a reference section.

If we just rename "references" this doesn't solve the problem - it just changes the words used to express the fundamental underlying issue. The issue is that "continuity" is poorly defined in terms of the wiki, not that "references" has a confusing name. See Thread:117229 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I for more. Czech's criticisms in this thread are about the epistemic differences between continuity and references - how no user can ever be confident at placing any fact in either section, as well as the fact that based on how our wiki defines the DWU the definition seems perhaps slightly incoherent. I really do encourage everyone to read that thread. Najawin ☎ 22:56, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

Even if it doesn't fix the underlying problem, as you say, there isn't any harm in renaming the section regardless.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

22:58, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

Sure, but I do want to note that I don't think it's related to my concerns in the thread in the OP. If people wish to do it they may. Najawin ☎ 23:16, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

So firstly, I don't think this proposal, in order to be worth implementing, needs to single-handedly resolve the confusion on precisely what these sections are. It's enough that it makes it significantly easier to have a discussion on that confusion. Because as it stands, any attempt to explain what the "continuity" section does tends to start talking about "continuity references" in the plain-English sense of the phrase, and pretty soon it devolves into gibberish. If we give "references" a less ambiguous name, we can at least be free to talk about the items in ==Continuity== as "references to past stories" without needlessly confusing the debate! I think that's reason enough to make the change even if we don't thereby believe ourselves to have solved the broader issue.

But with that being said, I agree “Continuity is similar to the "references" section, really, except that it usually includes things of narrative significance” is gobbledegook. It's just that I think this thread is completely confused about what the sections even are; it wholeheartedly fails at capturing the underlying rules which I think editors have intuitively converged on, even without a pithy summary to guide them. And perhaps those were not the purposes that the originators of these sections had in mind, but, you know, new-T:BOUND. The way editors now do things across the Wiki is what matters, even if it should turn out that the whole thing started as something of a misunderstanding 90,000 pages ago.

By my reckoning, in terms of current practice:

"Worldbuilding" (hitherto "References") is for summarising in-universe tidbits that are present in the source, but are not plot-rlevant and thus not included in the plot summary. It basically ensures that every in-universe page that uses a given story as a source, will be linked to from the source-page, as well as linking back to it.

Examples: "The Doctor mentions the [[Urgulbons]] of [[Planet 15]], who are stated to have five legs." "[[Albert Einstein]] makes a cameo among the guests at at Santa Claus's Halloween bash."

"Continuity" is for discussing the ways in which the present source makes references to, or was later referenced by, other covered sources.

Examples: "The Doctor summarises the events of TV: Classic Story to Amy Pond", "A panel from this story was later shown as a flashback in COMIC: Anniversary Continuity-Fest when the Doctor's memories were extracted by the Muddlon Brain Machine".

I just don't think there's that much overlap when you put it that way. There are, I think, two main sources of confusion besides the current names. Firstly, sometimes "Worldbuilding" items (or "References" items) aren't original to the source; sometimes they're things that have shown up before. "The Doctor mentions the [[Zygon]]s". But the aims are different. In a "References/Worldbuilding" section we should not care whether the mentioned Thingie has been mentioned before, just document the mention/cameo and its context. In a "Continuity" section, the fact that mentioning the Zygons is a continuity reference to a specific past source is what we're interested in. Indeed, the same factoid might belong in boths sections, cast in dfiferent lights.

The second is that we used to word Continuity points as in-universe statements, i.e. very much like "References". In both cases the line would have read "The Doctor mentions the Zygons.", it's just that the Continuity version would have appended "([[TV]]: ''[[Terror of the Zygons (TV story)|]]'')". But, you know, that's been deprecated as of Forum:Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes. Now, in terms of best practices, Continuity sections should wear their out-of-universe perspective on their sleeve, and that makes it abundantly clear that they deal with ways in which a given story connects with other stories, which I don't think anyone in their right mind would confuse with the "Worldbuilding" points which explicitly should not bring knowledge from other sources into their wording. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:22, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

I mean, I strongly disagree that there's little to no overlap, we can easily just apply the argument Czech gave from the thread I referenced to your hypothetical examples. Suppose there's a story where the Doctor decides to travel with scientists in the 31st century across the deserts of planet 15 and they've heard competing stories about how many legs the Urgulbons have but no editor has read the story because it's in some obscure short story collection from the 70s. Any piece of "worldbuilding" can be part of continuity and we just might not know it.

But I also am not convinced that this is how we consistently use the continuity section. See, for instance, Dalek. It's just the fact that the super phone appears that places it in the continuity section, not that it was upgraded in a past episode. Or just a joke being repeated. Hell.

The Doctor has previously had a group of soldiers aim their guns at him. (TV: Aliens of London, World War Three)

C'mon. If we're invoking T:BOUND as to what these things mean I'm really skeptical that your suggestion is at all accurate. Lest you think I'm cherry picking, I encourage everyone to click through, say, the Dalek stories from the new series. There's quite a few stretches. Najawin ☎ 02:03, 31 July 2023 (UTC)