Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27104094-20160205131602/@comment-27713488-20160207075323

Rafael367 wrote: 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. I couldn't quote you the footnote rules of either if I tried, nor would I want to hew strictly to one. All I'm pushing for is commonsense useful practices, not ones that hide relevant information behind needless layers.

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, That's reasonable. I haven't really looked hard at any of the walkthroughs here. I'm mostly talking about the wiki articles. All of this falls under the umbrella of "showing your work". It's pretty close to citations or "see also", rather than being part of page's subject. I'm fine with this.

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. Well, yes. All wikis work like this. All knowledge is contextualized by other knowledge, if you want to be philosophical. But that's what links are for; if you actually came into an article about Janine without knowing what Yhilin is, you can click the link to the countries page. But if it doesn't deserve its own page, and it's not a citation or "showing your work"... why not just put it on the page?

A good example of objectionable "references" is Carina's page. Every single "reference" there is actually information of interest about the article's main subject, Carina herself.

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. I'm looking at the wiki through wiki lenses, and you're telling me that's wrong. I feel as though you've just told me I should take a vow of chastity and become a Sister of Ivala to attract men.