Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27104094-20160205131602/@comment-27405625-20160207062511

Well, first off we aren't really writing here using the MLA I had to use from high school to my junior year of university. We aren't using the APA I had to use for the next six years after that and, (may his divine noodliness the FSM be praised), we are not using the Blue Book I had to use in law school. While I realize this is a wiki, it is less an academic exercise like Wikipedia, and more like a hybrid of fan sites and reporting. Our rules can be a bit looser and closer to say Pratchett than the J.A.M.A..

I'm dredging up all those references in the last paragraph because I see that Fluid-decanter and BetatesterFP are using the MLA general rules on the use of footnotes, and you're both kind of bouncing between that and the APA usages. The problem is that there are multiple writing styles for good reasons, not simply arbitrariness or in-group/out-group politics. MLA is great if you're studying questions with narrow focus. Think teasing out the use of language at a particular time, or writing on something that doesn't necessarily need to be reproducible by other researchers. If you're teasing out a particular data set from a particular experiment with a narrowly focused, testable hypothesis, MLA is inadequate. This was why APA was developed, their rules require citations for everything and even some discussion in the footnotes, because your results need to withstand peer review and be reproducible by other researchers.

In an article or report that is considered a binding opinion on the matter or part of a discussion between experts, APA is next to useless. Not only do you have to make citations and explanations, but you also have to be responsive to other opinions on the subject. Which is why Blue Book exists. Within Blue Book, you can have an entire 1/2 to 3/4 of a page be nothing but footnotes. In one of my tort law textbooks, there was one half page footnote that discussed what would happen in the same case with a slightly different fact pattern. It ended up taking up that much room, because that's what was required to answer the question without having to run into footnotes over several other pages. You'll see that in US Supreme Court decisions, where Justice Scalia will write a dissent that also has long critiques of Justice Kennedy's opinion in footnotes, and then Justice Kennedy's majority opinion will have a huge footnote responding to both Justice Scalia's dissent and his footnote critique. Kennedy's writing both what the correct decision is, why Scalia's analysis is wrong, and why Scalia's criticism of his decision is also wrong.

I understand where you're both coming from, but your rule sets don't really fit the wiki. The biggest users of footnotes are our walkthroughs, and they use them that much because the authors disagree on a lot of points. Sometimes we'll agree on an action for completely different reasons. The Blue Book style fits way better for this than the other two, but it's still inadequate for our project. I'm not only telling someone what to do in the main text, I'm also answering the question of why I did things that way, or why I'm ignoring an alternative. On top of this, I also have to address speculation on certain plot points, and reference certain humor within both the walkthrough and the game itself. You can kind of see that in the first page's comment section. My walkthrough is less than a month old, and I got that many responses on it before I broke down and started footnoting. The best fit to do all that seemed to be Terry Pratchett's style of footnotes. It's odd, but it does work.

The critique I saw often on the individual message board threads was that both walkthroughs were too long. The footnotes were another way to address this, while still adding all those extra details the comment sections were asking for. Also why I broke it up into multiple pages. It's less intimidating in sections, and unless you're actually interested in the footnoted parts, you can skim over them. You can thus read the main text without footnotes to get enough information to adequately understand the game, and the footnotes are there if you need that extra layer of depth.

Finally, while Lostone2 brought up the Janine page as an example, it's kind of important to look at that page itself in the proper context. You're kind of seeing that as if it's a stand alone article. It is much more complex than that. You have a few dozen pages that are now or will later link into that, as well as links within the page itself to other pages. Just looking at that page itself, it's a part of the rulers group, which is a part of the larger characters group. That's why it has the links it has in the main box. You only understand that page if you have the ability to see it in context with these other pages, too. So, Janine is less a discrete article than it is a common footnote used by many other pages. That footnote is nuanced and complex enough that it also requires its own footnotes. The footnotes in the wiki aren't necessarily creeping so much as they're trying to address all these issues so that we don't need to have a gigantic forum with myriad topics.

The TL:DR version of that is simply that you've got a good concern, but you're looking at the wiki with the wrong set of lenses.