Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1317169-20121202170842/@comment-88790-20121204140432

It's been the root cause for some people CzechOut, although, I have seen more people adding Continuity information to References in the past year, which was what partly contributed to my lack of argument on combining the sections.

But we will still need to be clear what information goes where when/if we combine the two.

If we could, as CzechOut suggests have have a table, template or something which allows us to grab all the links within a reference section and display it in a table/list and also with a click of a show/hide display them with their contextual sentences, then that would be a good compromise. Though I'm not sure how workable that would be or if it would be practical to implement.

In some ways, and musing on what CzechOut has already said, References is in fact simpler to define than Continuity.

References is basically everything significant in the story, broken down and presented. References are simple, it's everything in the text that's significant in the DWU.

But Continuity means we have to make narrative judgements about the story, and we have to decide what is a link and what is…stories happening to take place in similar places or mention similar things but not actually have any links. Take for example the Continuity sections on An Unearthly Child (TV story) (second last bullet point), Dalek (TV story) (last 2 bullet points) and The Ghosts of N-Space (audio story) (bullet points 2 and 3). All of this information is notable, yes, but none of it is really a direct link between that story and any of those linked to in the Continuity section.

Just because stories happen to take place in the same year or happen to mention the same thing doesn't mean they're linked.

Continuity would possibly be better renamed "Connections" as it's the connections between the stories we're really concerned with.

On the flip side of things, we could just get rid of Continuity entirely. If we say each story page represents information about that story, then References makes sense as it's all DWU information from within that story. But Continuity is based in part on defining the connections between it and another story, yes some of it comes from within that story, but some comes from outside of it. I would argue on the other side (of this flip side) that those connections are what makes it part of a large group of stories, that it is those connections that help to frame the story.