Forum:References/Notes/Continuity

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Opening

This is gonna be a quick one because I was going to bring it up in "References to Worldbuilding", but that thread has already been locked, so…

I always found the ordering of our pages' References, Notes, and Continuity sections to be kind of illogical. References and Continuity are typically about the in-universe stuff, while Notes are facts about the stories themselves, right? So why is Notes sandwiched between the other two? Surely a more logical progression would be References > Continuity > Notes? WaltK ☎ 12:58, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

I agree with this. The current placement is confusing. Aquanafrahudy 📢 13:39, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

I hadn't considered this, but, taking another page out of the Jenny Everywhere Wiki's format, they do just this:

== Contents ==
=== Plot ===
=== Worldbuilding ===
=== Continuity ===
== Behind the scenes ==

This is from The Time of the Toymaker. I think we may need to consider, apart from References (or Worldbuilding)/Notes/Continuity, sections such as Gallery, which are both somewhat in- and out-of-universe.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

17:22, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

We don't really have a lot of gallery sections. I didn't even know we had them until found it in use on The Minister of Chance (series), where it was empty until I added some images to it. Perhaps they should be made use of a bit more? Aquanafrahudy 📢 17:29, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not entirely convinced, though it's a fair point (and I also suspect it would be harder to automate a change like this, though I may be wrong). I think a fair rationale for the status quo is that Notes, like Plot and Worldbuilding but unlike Continuity, is entirely focused on content relating to the work at hand, whereas Continuity is separated out by discussing its connections to other works. Unrelatedly, in a purely user-flow sense, I think there's value in sandwiching "Story notes" between the other two rather than banishing it to the end of the page, because this information is frequently of more immediate value to readers than the continuity points. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:10, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Scrooge's analysis, and I like the current setup as it is. – n8 (☎) 13:21, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

I too think Scrooge's argument makes sense. Aquanafrahudy 📢 13:23, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, "Continuity" should go last.BananaClownMan ☎ 19:23, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

One very brief aside; we should also do something about how we can never seem to decide between "Notes" or "Story notes". WaltK ☎ 19:11, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Given how narrativity isn't a concern anymore, I've been converting all instances of "story notes" to "notes", at least to maintain consistency between "(feature)" pages and other sources. @Bongo50 probably could just use @Botgo50 to change all of these much faster than I possibly could.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

19:15, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

I'd like to put forward that "Continuity" should focus on links to past releases instead of mentioning retroactively placed material from stories published later, to help keep track of release orders, prevent overgrounding the subheading and avoid repetition on multiple pages. Maybe even rename the subheading "References" or "Call backs" or some other synonym. BananaClownMan ☎ 19:23, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

BCM, that's a thought-provoking proposal, but ultimately I disagree. We as a wiki collectively decided to not care about repetition on multiple pages when we created T:NOUN; and besides, wouldn't a story page just be obviously incomplete if it doesn't mention how later stories have connected to it? That said, you raise a really interesting point about keeping track of release orders. Sorting "Continuity" section bullet points by story release date would be a pain to do manually, but it's the sort of thing that might be implemented with a template, now we have {{cite source}}. But that would certainly lie outside the scope of this thread, and while interesting, it doesn't strike me as a high priority. – n8 (☎) 14:21, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Recall that under current policy, all "Continuity" points should be written with a real-world point of view. This allows them to specify the order of release; "This story was later alluded to in TV: Example" vs. "The Doctor states BlahBlahBlah in reference to AUDIO: Source".

Sorting via a template doesn't seem wise, because sometimes you'll bundle in multiple stories in a single sentence; indeed sometimes you'll naturally combine a referenced story and a story that references the present one e.g. "This story continues Brian the Ood's adventures following the events of COMIC: The Brand Extension of the Time Lord Victorious; his story-thread within TLV was next picked up in AUDIO: Tangentially-Related Eighth Doctor Romp". Yes?Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 15:07, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

In my opinion, ideally such a template would look at all the release dates in a bullet point and cite based on the earliest one. But I agree that far exceeds the bounds of what's reasonable. When I made that suggestion I'd forgotten about cases where multiple sources are cited in a single bullet point. – n8 (☎) 15:43, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Conclusion

General consensus is that the current order is preferable to the proposed order and Scrooge MacDuck's reasoning is very convincing. As such, the proposed new order will not be adopted. A few smaller topics of discussion were brought up during the course of the discussion. Regarding "Notes" vs "Story notes", witching all instances of "Story notes" over to "Notes" seems like a reasonble extension of the recent non-narrative validity changes. As such, I will set User:Botgo50 to do this. Regarding "Continuity" sections, BananaClownMan's proposal did not gain support and so will not be enacted. Regarding automated ordering through a template, doing so would be possible, including NateBumber's suggestion of using the earliest date for multi-source bullet points, but this will require a separate thread. Bongo50 ☎ 18:00, 17 December 2023 (UTC)