Forum:SH Archive/Manual of style: Citing forum posts

Forums > Consensus track archive > SH Archive/Manual of style: Citing forum posts

This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made in the Senate Hall or new Consensus Track pages rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record. The result was No consensus on to take action. When referencing forums in articles, it is suggested that the writer chose to use a consistent form for how they present forum posts titles in references; however, there is no consensus on establishing a hard layout that writers must follow. Greyman@wikia(Talk) 01:33, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

For various reasons, we sometimes need to cite specific posts or threads on a forum; we don't really have a consistent way of doing so, though, so I figure we should come up with a citation format.

A few things that I think every forum citation should have:

  1. The thread title.
  2. The forum name.
  3. If it's citing just one post in the thread:
    1. A specific link to the post.
    2. The time and date the post was made.
    3. The poster name.

So I propose a formatting something along these lines:

I just used TFN for that, but it would apply to any forum. While I think all the elements I've included should be in there, some things to consider are:

  • Date formatting: We could do it in one specific format, or we could do it as the board lists it, if that's not an option that can be changed (this is what I've done above).
  • Punctuation: I've been using "—" for this in my articles, but CC-5052 uses parentheses, which I rather like; I've used them above.
  • The order of all the various elements.

These are fairly trivial matters, but I think anchoring them down for a consistent look would be a good thing.

Linking to a specific post

This isn't a CT item, but rather advice. If we do have an MoS entry on this, we should probably include something like this so people know how to do it.

A lot of forum software has some way of linking directly to a post; usually a link on each post that says "URL" or "anchor" or "#". Unfortunately, the two most commonly cited forums, the Jedi Council Forums and Starwars.com message boards, don't.

Jedi Council Forums

Unfortunately you can't link to just one post on the JC. However, there is a link that will always link you to the page the post is on, regardless of how many posts you have set to display per page.

This is assuming you've already found the post in the thread. Let's say I want to quote a jasonfry post from the Galactic Cartography thread about the Atlas. On my page settings it's here:

http://boards.theforce.net/literature/b10003/21938930/p52

But that doesn't work for someone with 15 or 50 posts per page. Click on "Post History" under the post, which takes you to jasonfry's post history. Then, and this can be tedious if the poster has made a lot of posts, go through the pages until you reach the date and time of the post you want to quote (for Fry, we'd be lucky; it's his second to last post when I quoted this). Then copy the URL:

http://boards.theforce.net/Message.aspx?topic=21938930&brd=10003&start=28246682

And that will always link you to the right page.

Starwars.com

This is easier. First find the page. In this case, let's quote a Tasty Taste post about how WEG used to be S-canon. Here's the page:

http://forums.starwars.com/thread.jspa?threadID=152583&start=1815

Note the "start=1815": that's the post count. Just count how many posts below the first one Tasty's post is, and add it to that. In this case it's 3 after (that is, it's the fourth one on the page), so adding 3 gives you 1818:

http://forums.starwars.com/thread.jspa?threadID=152583&start=1818

Now Tasty's post is at the top of the page.

-- Lord Hydronium 20:52, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Discussion

  • Not that I'm ignoring this Hydro, but I just don't care too much as long as it's consistent. Atarumaster88 Jedi Order (Talk page) 23:29, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Looks good. It's structure that we need. -- Riffsyphon1024 07:51, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
  • I like this, though I'd like editors to have license to alter the titles of the threads ever so slightly. As in, one might not include the "Vader wants his damn pants back!" part of the example Hydro posted above, or (like I've done on Dass Jennir) leave out the numerous exclamation marks in the thread title, simply because they often look bad. Thoughts? Another thing I just thought of: perhaps a dating system different to 1/1/01 might work best, since Americans put the month first and then the day (which makes absolutely no sense to me, but whatever) while people in the UK and probably Australia put the day first. Maybe just "1 January 2001" or something would work best for readability. -- AdmirableAckbar (Talk) 16:58, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Like the idea, but per Acky on the dates. Green Tentacle (Talk) 17:48, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Per GT. JorrelWiki-shrinkableFraajic 17:52, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Per Jorrel. —Xwing328(Talk) 04:43, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
  • I agree on the dates, but I think maximum fidelity should be made to thread titles, spelling errors and all. You can always sic [sic] on them anyway. Thefourdotelipsis 08:07, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Per Acky. Crazy Americans. Chack Jadson (Talk) 22:01, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Acky's idea about dates makes sense, but I agree with 4dot when it comes to titles. Since what we're citing is the thread, we should include the thread's name as it's written. - Lord Hydronium 22:15, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
    • I understand your reasoning, though I don't really agree. It's not like we'd be changing the name, just leaving out a portion; the same way we leave A Novel of the Old Republic out of PoD. Not a big deal, anyway. -- AdmirableAckbar (Talk) 22:23, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
      • Thread titles are malleable, so I'm not sure how effective a hard requirement on sticking to the full thread title would be. Furthermore, should we be citing the thread title of the first post (the one that a thread is listed under on a forum), or the one of the particular post we're quoting? A thread title change after the post in question often results in these two things being different. jSarek 22:15, 28 May 2008 (UTC)