User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Time Lord Academy/@comment-24451551-20150803183720/@comment-26975268-20150810114400

Side Rat wrote: as we would never place a punctuation mark such as a comma or a semicolon before a citation in mid-sentence.

Actually, that's pretty standard right now as well. I can't speak for whether or not it's "proper" — and we literally have a protocol saying all full stories should be italicised regardless of actual grammatical rules because it was decided in the forums, so it doesn't seem like we're too bothered about what's proper — but I must say, from an organisational perspective, on this wiki, the current formatting does make sense.

I say this because the paranthetical citation is not just for the sentence preceding it in most cases. Citations (in DWU articles, that is) are stories here, so it would make complete sense to have a full article on a place, object or character, and to have to cite the whole thing with one source at the end. Having a citation follow all punctuation, at least to me, is saying "all that came between the last citation/start of page and the end of this previous (part of) sentence falls under this citation." Not just the meat of a singular sentence, which an internal citation would sort of be "part of"?

I can't know if any of the above was considered when the initial decision was made, as I don't know all the history, but, in my opinion, it works quite well as is, and effectively demonstrates exactly what we want the citations to represent.