Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1678571-20191229152222/@comment-1432718-20200101020826

There's not really much more I need to add here. User:OncomingStorm12th, User:SOTO and User:Borisashton have done a great job of covering most of the details. There are just a couple of technical things to address for Reference sections.

First, I know a people have different ideas of what this wiki should be, but basically any wiki is designed so that users will click on page after page. That is why we only include brief mentions of items in the References section, to encourage people to click on the pages (as User:SOTO points out).

Second, if something occurs in the plot, and is important to the plot, it will be in the plot section. If it's somewhere else on the page (Plot, Characters, Continuity), it doesn't need to be placed in References. Some of our story pages (especially TV episodes) are long enough already without information being duplicated throughout the page.

And as User:Borisashton points out, some of the removed info (and I'm usually the one doing that) is info that already is or should be included in the plot section. I get that it's hard to write plot summaries (since I've written over 400 myself), but anything that drives the plot should not be put in References.

I realize this doesn't quite answer User:MrThermomanPreacher's original question, but long lists of "random nouns" is not what we want. For one thing, the ease of adding items would encourage users to add items that are already on the page. Putting items in a sentence (say, "The Doctor mentions Stevie Wonder.") gives a tiny bit of context and makes the individual entries more interesting.

Sorry for the long post, but defining the References section on story pages is something that I have been working on for quite a while.