User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Time Lord Academy/@comment-24451551-20150803183720/@comment-24451551-20150804215541

Firstly, thank you for your reply.

I don't think it's proper, and that isn't merely an aesthetic personal opinion. It's inconsistent both with established systems of parenthetical citation such as MLA and APA formats (just for example, not that the goal here is to follow or emulate them specifically) and internally, as we would never place a punctuation mark such as a comma or a semicolon before a citation in mid-sentence. A period should be no different. Punctuation preceding parentheses is in general a no-no in both American and British English as far as I have been able to discern. It doesn't seem to be the result of a difference in conventions such as those governing punctuation and quotation marks. The fact that another unrelated wiki might be making the same error doesn't seem good enough reason to continue making it ourselves.

I'm certainly not going to go about trying to change this on my own, but we should find some sort of consensus in the community and remedy it (through the use of a bot if possible, I should think). What would be the most appropriate forum/procedure to begin working towards accomplishing this? Thanks again for your advice.