Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130519053621/@comment-7302713-20130519170138

What if we do both?

Here's a section from my coffee article:
 * Coffee was often served with milk and sugar. The Ninth Doctor took his coffee with milk but no sugar. Coffee was often served with breakfast. Amy Pond once drank coffee for breakfast.

What if we both have the references in-line, and at the end of the paragraph:
 * Coffee was often served with milk and sugar. The Ninth Doctor took his coffee with milk but no sugar. Coffee was often served with breakfast. Amy Pond once drank coffee for breakfast. (TV: Rose, 'The Sea Devils; PROSE: The Coming of the Terraphiles'')

I don't think that ref tags are too hard for readers to handle, but this way gives us the best of both. The references are in-line there at the end of the paragraph, but the way they would be. But, the references are also in the middle, where they belong. This means that we don't have to break up article text by having references in the middle of paragraphs or sentences. And we can keep with our current format of organising multiple references by media and not by the order they appeared in. (we do TV: title, title2; PROSE, title3 even if within the paragraph they references are title1, title3, title3)

So we have the precision that references should have while having the easy availibility of in-line citations. And remember, being able to precisely reference things isn't just a benefit to editors trying to fact check something but to readers trying to find something. This bugged me a lot as a reader because I'd see something in an article that I didn't remember or didn't know and click through to the reference and find that it wasn't what I was looking for. So I'd go back to the article and try to figure out what in-line citation was the one I was looking for. This both makes the references super-easy for the user to see and grab, though, I do think that ref tags aren't too hard for users to handle.

While I've slowly gotten used to the TARDIS in-line citations, it's still a bit weird to me. And it was very strange when I first came here. I don't know if I'd seen citations done like that before, at least on the scale we're using here. And while I like that we bother to use citations, the format has always bothered me. If I'm reading an article about a part of Doctor Who I know nothing about, these citations are not really helpful. And I've spent a fair amount of time going and looking up things that were not the things I wanted to look up, because of the way citations are done.

And yes, we want readers to click through to other articles, but we don't want to mislead them. And I've been misled a lot because of the way that citations are done here. I want things to be easy for our editors and readers but not at the expense of accuracy and readability. And I think that the in-line citation method often affects at least one of these, if not both.

And, as this proposal shows, this doesn't have to be all one or the other.