Forum:Notes and citations

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Opening post

Hey, all! This is a follow-up thread to Forum:Separating Footnotes and References, where we decided to separate out the sections which house {{notelist}} and {{reflist}}.

It's come to my attention that that discussion's closing post seemed to establish (quite broadly) that "Footnotes" should be separated from "References", without much of a consensus as to the exact formatting.

There are two problems here. The first was entirely overlooked in the original discussion (which I missed entirely): even though we have renamed the "References" sections on story pages to "Worldbuilding"... "References" has also long been used on in-universe pages, for a slightly different (but quite similar) purpose.

See, for example, Rain#References. Since "References" has a long-established meaning on this wiki, I am strongly against using this as a heading or subheading for sources. The reason from before still largely applies. We should not be using the same section name for two wildly different purposes.

The second issue for us to address is that of the exact formatting. What everyone seems to have done since this ruling — which, I have to admit, I thought had been laid out in that forum discussion, not having fully caught up on the time I was away — is set up these footnotes in the following way:

== Footnotes ==
=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}

=== Sources/Citations/References ===
{{reflist}}

The original ruling calls for separate sections, not subsections, but I actually think the people's solution works much better. I would like for us to formalise exactly what these sections should look like.

Proposal

My proposal is to use subsections, as above, under "Footnotes", but with "Citations" (or, if it proves more popular, "Sources") rather than "References", which is rather taken.

Notes should come first, because readers will be most interested in them and should not have to wade through a long list of citations.

And one final matter for us to come to a decision on: in the case that a page has only notes, or only citations, should we still use the subheading? I submit the question to the community.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 00:37, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

I agree that a different name to "References" should be used. I think I prefer "Citations" as "Sources", while correct, has a strong in-universe bias on this wiki (e.g. {{cite source}}). Regarding formatting, while I ultimately don't care that much, I prefer entirely separate (e.g. second level ==) headings for "Footnotes"/"Notes" (I prefer "Footnotes") and "References"/"Citations"/"Sources" (to reiterate, I prefer "Citations") as laid out in N8's example in his original OP. There's not really a great reason for this and it's very arbitrary, but it would also solve the issue in SOTO's last sentence. However, I strongly agree that "Footnotes"/"Notes" should come above "References"/"Citations"/"Sources", primarily for the reasoning SOTO gave, but also because, while you can include notes in citations and citations in notes, and I think both should be allowed, including a citation in a note is likely more common so it makes sense for citations to come after notes. Bongo50 ☎ 00:12, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

(I would not be entirely opposed to that, incidentally. It has always bothered me that what we call "Footnotes" are not actually usually footnotes.)
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 05:19, 26 November 2024 (UTC)