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)