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
 * 1) Ensuring that information can be verified easily
 * 2) Providing a useful starting point for further research

I feel that 1 and 2 are somewhat self-explanatory. Allowing easy verifying of information is why readers should trust us, and it makes our job easier. It's the primary reason we have citations at all. At the moment, all you're given in the majority of cases is the name of the story, and that makes verifying information hard. It's similar when it comes to further research. If you want to look more deeply into a piece of information's presentation in a given source, you're currently expected to dig through the entire source when less than 1% of it may actually be relevant. I feel, for both of these reasons, that it is good to be able to look at a citation and jump exactly to where in the source the information is from. Some sources on Tardis are long. The War Games is over 4 hours long. Stories like Liberation of the Daleks are serialised over months of magazines or comics with many individual installments to track down. In both of these cases, it would be much more useful to be directed to exactly where in the source the information is from rather than just the source as a whole, and there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of similar cases accross this wiki. This is common in academic citation formats which frequently include page numbers in their references and, while I don't think we should adopt one such format directly, they are commonly used in professional publications for a reason. Making citations more accurate can only serve to make the wiki more useful and trustworthy as a reference resource.

3 is something that I feel warrants a little more discussion. As many of us know, Doctor Who is not like other franchises. There is no officially defined, exhaustive, cannon, and this leads to different fans having different ideas on what "counts" for them. Some don't really care: fiction's fiction. Others may want to be a little more confined, only considering stuff licensed by the BBC to count. Others may go tighter still, only caring about Big Finish and the TV show, or even just the TV show itself! This wiki should cater for as many of these groups as is possible, whether we agree with their stances or not, and I posit that we currently don't do a great job of it. Currently, the only information you get about a source from a citation is its name and its medium (from the prefix). Unless you have the names and contexts of every source memorised, or you have a very weird idea of what "counts" (e.g. only TV and AUDIO, which means you would include Lucifer and Iris Wildthyme Speaks...! while exlcuding Alien Bodies and the prequels. I don't think anyone is using this definition of what "counts" or any similar ones), the information immediately presented is not helpful. Of course, a reader can just click through to the source's page, but this isn't very helpful in giving an immediate picture of whether you should care. It can be quite disruptive to have to break the flow of reading to visit a different page, wait for that to load, learn what you need to learn and then bounce back to the original page. The solution, the way I see it, is to include more contextual information in citations.

The wiki used to do this a lot better but, at the same time, absolutely appallingly. If you aren't currently aware, this wiki used to have prefixes based on series, not medium, so instead of "(TV: Rose)", you'd have "(DW: Rose)". This meant that we had a lot of prefixes. To quote CzechOut, "90. Nine-zero." to be exact.