User:Quiddity/Sidebar citations

Right-rail - The idea of citations/footnotes shown parallel in the new whitespace.

Internal mockup and notes

Demo of citation sidebar article design idea - a hand-edited screenshot of w:en:Foobar.

Positives

1. They give useful added context in some footnotes, e.g. (FAs)
   • w:Katsudō Shashin#Notes
   • w:Samuel Merrill Woodbridge#References
2. Would help readers to understand sourcing concepts, especially if there was a header with an info-link to w:WP:Verifiability.
3. Would encourage readers to look at the citations directly.

Drawbacks

1. Less beneficial if short-cite style is used, e.g. (FAs)
   • w:Si Ronda#References
   • w:Nico Ditch#References
2. Increased prominence of external links, which will mis-motivate COI-edits, e.g. (FAs)
   • w:2005 ACC Championship Game#Notes

Complexities / open questions

1. How could this integrate with Help:Edit check suggestions?
2. How could this integrate with embedded calls-to-actions, as in templates like {{Citation needed span}}?
3. How could this integrate with showing talkpage discussions about specific elements directly on the page?
   • cf. T185607 (Provide an inline discussion feature, "DiscussThis")
   • and T89575 (Associate non-body content such as annotations and talk to a location in the article)

External examples

• https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/#sidenotes
• https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/#/history - Click into a chapter, and then scroll down, and have a browser-window that is 1200+px wide.
• https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/latecomers-guide-to-crypto - both annotations, and discussions

Implementation notes

• https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2023/09/12/nuclear-anchored-sidenotes/ - very promising research