Forum:Cite source, a new citation template

work in progress

Opening post
After 2 years, I am finally ready to present one of my biggest projects on this wiki:. It's a project that has taken up hours of my life, undergone 2 major rewrites and expanded in scope beyond what I ever initially imagined. In short, it's a citation template, aimed at making the information on this wiki more verifiable, making it easier to perform further research and helping readers in deciding whether a piece of information is relevant to them. Before going in depth on what the template can do, I'd first like to explore some of my reasoning and methodology behind the template and citations in general.

Methodology
Citations on this wiki fall into 2 categories: in-universe citations, which I'm concerned with here, and out-of-universe citations, which I have plans to work on in the future but will primarily not be concerned with here. In-universe citations currently look like this:
 * (TV: The Daleks)

They're used on in-universe pages to denote which source information in part of a sentance, a whole sentance, a paragraph, or multiple paragraphs comes from. They're placed in brackets and composed of a prefix, in this case TV, and the source name, in this case The Daleks. That is all of the information that a reader recieves in most cases (the exception to this is that it is permissable to cite a specific, named, episode of early Hartnell serials, such as "The Dead Planet").

I believe that all citations, both in-universe and out-of-universe, serve 2 major goals: In addition, I believe that in-universe citations have a third major goal that out-of-universe citations don't: Allowing readers to see whether a piece of information is relevant, or even "true", to them I will now exam each of these goals in turn.
 * 1) Ensuring that information can be verified easily
 * 2) Providing a useful starting point for further research

Goal 1
It is important, for any good citation system, that a reader, editor, or really anyone should be able to look at a citation and locate exactly where the piece of information that the citation is for is in the cited source. That way, editors and admins can quickly remove false statements and verify true ones, and readers can learn to trust the wiki more by checking for themselves that some fact is correct and that it really is from the source in question (or can at least feel easy knowing that it is an easy option). Currently, this isn't always the easiest to do with in-universe citations. As previously mentioned, all that is provided in a citation is the source's name (or maybe the name of a specific episode for early Hartnell serials). This is not very helpful for quickly verifying information. Some sources are long. The War Games is over 4 hours long. Our Time Lord article currently states that "They were seen as immortal, or nearly so, (TV: The War Games, Last of the Time Lords)". As you can see, one of the sources provided for this statement is The War Games. Anybody wanting to verify whether this was actally said in this source would have to sit through potentially 4 hours of TV. This is an extreme example, but we have many long sources on this wiki that not everyone will have experienced yet, let alone committed to memory. This leads to a situation where a lot of work is required just to check for yourself whever something is true. Perhaps a more realistic example might be someone wishing to verify whether the information in the lead of Fadros Pallujikaa (The Christmas Invasion) is actually from The Widow's Curse (comic story). Anyone wishing to check this information would potentially have to purcahse or overwise track down 4 old issues of Doctor Who Magazine when, instead, the specific part number could just be included in the citation, massively narrowing down the size of the search.

Goal 2
This is, in many ways, an extension of the first goal: sometimes, people may read a piece of information and just want to know if there is anything more. In these cases, ensuring that citations are precise is very helpful for accomadating this further research. Lets say that someone has stumbled upon Bureau of Possible Events and they want to know if Lungburrow says anything else about it. At this time, they would have a 256 page book to sift through. It would be much better if we just gave the chapter or even the page number of the relevant passage(s) in the book.