User:ThoughtIdRetired/sandbox/study of notes and referencing in FAs

This study is of 101 Featured Articles from Featured articles. The intended sample was 50 from the top of the alphabetical list and 50 from the bottom – one extra was accidentally included. The article Vasa (ship) was ignored as this study is to assist discussion about notes and formatting in that article.

Method
The article list was cut and pasted into an Excel spreadsheet, retaining the links of the article names. Each article was opened from the spreadsheet and the following parameters were recorded.
 * Is there a separate section for informational notes – text that conveys information related to the subject of the article but which is not solely about which references support the article text? The section is not necessarily called "informational notes".
 * If there is not separate informational notes section, are there any informational notes included among the section with the article references? Note was taken on whether or not the content of these notes was referenced, and if so, how.
 * (Incidental to the main purpose of the study.) The high level referencing style, recorded as whether or not short form references were used. These were identified by the existence of a "sources" (or similar) section that contained full citations. A few individual citations were checked to see if the mouseover functionality was there, indicative of a template such as being used. If the high level citation style (short referencing versus full referencing) was inconsistent, this is described as "mixed" with a qualitative note on the degree to which it is inconsistent.

Limitations
All the parameters were judged by a quick inspection of the article. Particularly in looking for informational notes included in with the references, this is not an error-free process. However, the result is believed to be of sufficient quality to be of use.

Findings
(The complete data table is shown further below.)

Frequency of separate notes sections
Of the 101 Featured Articles checked, 68 (67%) had some sort of informational footnote. Of these, 61 (90%) showed these notes in a separate section the article's references. Of the 7 articles which included informational notes in the same section as references, 4 had no reference of any kind to support the factual material. Those that did have references did so in a narrative form in the note, which could be at variance to the referencing method used elsewhere. The observation is made that any article with more than one or two informational notes used a separate note section. Some made quite extensive use of notes.

High level citation style consistency
(This was a by-product of the main emphasis of the study.)

Nine articles did not use any form of short form referencing (9.9%). Twenty articles used short form referencing exclusively (19.8%). The remainder (71.3%) showed inconsistent styles, with varying degrees of mixing of the two methods. Only one article was tagged for having an unclear citation style (Borobudur – and this has changed since data capture as the article is now undergoing substantial restructuring). Such a tag could have been applied to a large number of articles in the study.

Mouseover functionality
(This was taken as an indicator of use of a template such as.

Of the 92 articles that used short form references in at least one instance, 29 (32%) were found not to have a functioning mouseover that displayed the full reference.