Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-25654456-20200526044809/@comment-18014300-20200526145144

I would like to clarify just in case for everyone, including Vilka, that what I meant by full citations before are the kind of citations people use in the real-world for academic papers, scholarly works, etc. where the author's name' the title of a section, article, or entry in the source; title of the source; the publisher; the publishing date; the page number if applicable, etc. are all included. We already have been using full citations when citing to real-world sources outside Assassin's Creed, but we have never done this for Assassin's Creed sources for the sake of simplicity and convenience for our editors.

The is the most straightforward way to resolve this persistent question of how "deep" we should cite is to require full citations in all cases. This also simultaneously resolves the issue regarding formatting since we had a former moderator insist that we use unconventional symbols to demarcate different levels and information of the source being cited. We should recognize that at a certain point if we intend to include more and more information in our citations that we really should not be inventing our own original citation style because that would be confusing for readers.

The main problem with requiring full citations for even Assassin's Creed sources is that that may pose a burden for our editors and increase their workload as it would take a lot more time to write out the citations. Because of this, I am neutral on whether or not we should implement this solution.

If we don't go this route, we come back to the question of how "deep" we should be citing. As I said on Discord, I found it awkward to treat items as documents that can be cited but also recognize the benefit. Lacrosse brings up a good suggestion. Previously when I saw someone citing to Rebellion character bios (might've actually been Lacrosse), I was a bit uncomfortable with that as well for the same reason. However, I came to accept it—notwithstanding that I later discovered that I set the precedent for it on a whim but forgot lol. I think that Assassin's Creed: Odyssey – Dagger of Kronus: Description might be a good idea. My only concern to that would be "Description" not always being a title. With the Rebellion characters, I was able to justify it by the fact they had a tab titled "Bio". But then to be honest I might just be too fastidious here, so I'll definitely remain open to this idea.

Apart from the question that Vilka raised, I would like to introduce several other questions about formatting style for sources.

Abbreviating the main title in subsequent citations

You guys can see this example in the Ezio Auditore da Firenze article. Francesco was the one who first began doing this, where all subsequent citations to Assassin's Creed II, for example, are abbreviated to "AC2" followed by "– [memory]". How do you guys feel about this? I was initially opposed and even reverted it but as I was rewriting the article, I realized that it made the reference section neater.

My proposal for this is that we don't require this, but it can be recommended for particularly massive articles with many citations.

The one issue with this is that we would need to standardize abbreviations. For example, does ACR refer to Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Rogue, or Rebellion? In years past, before even I edited here, the old editors seemed to have standardized the abbreviated forms for the main installments. I would not mind re-visiting this. I also recommend that only main installments and some prominent side-games have abbreviated forms. More obscure works should never be abbreviated.

Repeated hyperlinks

Darman brought this matter up to me recently on my talk page. He asked why do we have a practice of re-linking main titles which we have already cited, so for example "Assassin's Creed II – Power to the People" then "Assassin's Creed II – Mob Justice" instead of "Assassin's Creed II – Mob Justice". I told him that we don't have a hard rule either way, and it is just owing to consistency that we incidentally normalized the "double links".

My proposal for this is the same for abbreviations. I don't think we should require it to be either way provided its consistent within an article.

Quotation marks

Many months back, it dawned on me that if we're being technical, memory titles should be set within quotation marks and perhaps so should any documents we cite. This is because English formatting rules has always been that titles of large works like books, video games, films, etc. are italicized (in typed writing, underlined in handwriting) while titles of articles, chapters, and any source within a large work are situated within quotation marks. The quotation marks are not optional; they serve the same role as the italicization.

Because of this, I've started to think that memory titles should technically always be surrounded by quotation marks and maybe Database entry titles as I well. I was the one to popularize citations to memories, not just the video game, so I felt pretty bad about not having done this from the beginning because I think the mind has a tendency to see quotation marks as unnecessary when a title is already highlighted by its hyperlink... I later discovered this article, "Emmanuel Barraza", where a former administrator went into specific entries for Assassin's Creed: Initiates throughout the article at a time when this was not common practice on this wiki. He did this before I had the same idea much later, but unlike me, he had included the quotation marks. However, he only situated the third-level of titles in quotation marks, not the second, e.g. Assassin's Creed: Inititaes – Surveillance: "Osaka's Underworld" instead of ''Assassin's Creed: Inititaes – "Surveillance: Osaka's Underworld". I have no idea which is technically correct.

But requiring or not requiring quotation marks felt like too trivial of a matter to press. We had not been using quotation marks in any of the memory citations all this time, and I don't want to burden us all by suddenly mandating them. So my question for you guys is: do you guys think that quotation marks should be used with documents and titles within larger works? Do you think we should just exempt them from missions and database entries?

Full citation format

Whether or not we require full citations for Assassin's Creed works, we are using full citations for real-world sources. So a relevant question is which formatting style should we use for the full citations, like MLA, Chicago, APA, etc. I recommend the same guideline as Wikipedia. We will not require a particular style as long as the same style is used throughout an article for consistency. I think this would be most convenient for all editors who may favor one over another.

EDIT: By the way, Vilka, I edited the title of your thread to reflect it being a broader thread about amendments to citation style since I wanted these other questions to be covered as well.