User:Vaticidalprophet/The problem with shortened footnotes

Shortened footnotes are a popular way to handle inline citations in Wikipedia articles, particularly those that make heavy use of books and other print sources. Rather than using a full-length citation such as a cite book template for each use, shortened footnotes have an abbreviated name-year-page format for the inline cites itself and relegate the full cite to a "Bibliography" or "Works cited" section. Most shortened footnotes are made using the sfn template, but some are made by hand (using simply ) or using other templates such as harvnb.

Shortened footnotes look similar to referencing formats originally designed for print, such as most academic citation formats. They also look 'neater' in the edit window, as the source text has an abbreviated sfn template compared to a large CS1 template (though this is significantly less true for hand-formatted citations). For these reasons, they're popular and frequently suggested to new editors in ways that imply they're the "correct" or "required" way to format book citations. However, shortened footnotes have significant downsides that often aren't fully considered when making a choice about whether to use them or not.

Accessibility to a broad audience
Wikipedia is one of the most-visited and most-recognizable websites and the most-read reference work in history. Its readers draw from every age, nationality, socioeconomic class, and background. The only assumption you can make about a reader is that they have an internet connection and some grasp of English; even these assumptions falter once you consider offline backups and people using machine translations.

While the context of shortened footnotes are clear to people familiar with print-originating reference formats, this familiarity cannot be assumed of readers. The metonymical intelligent fourteen-year-old (and if you're the right age, you remember reading Wikipedia in class then to look like you were busy working) may not have been exposed to such formats in their education yet. Other readers may not have been at all; the age at which students are expected to reference prolifically in their work has dropped over the years, and an older reader without a university degree may have never seen a non-Wikipedia work that uses them. Even a bright and inquisitive person with substantial general knowledge may have knowledge gaps around the technicalities of footnoting, or not anticipate this format in a Wikipedia article specifically if they've only seen full citation styles in others.

A demonstration of the inaccessibility of shortened footnotes to many readers can be seen in the number of editors they're inaccessible to. Your essayist has seen experienced editors repeatedly move sfned cites to "External links" or "Further reading", not understanding they were references. If these citation formats are inaccessible to people familiar with Wikipedia, why should they be assumed understood by the far broader audience of the general population?

Hypertext and NOTPAPER
Wikipedia is not paper. This is to say, amongst other things, it is not bound to the stylistic conventions of print. Shortened footnotes are mandatory in a print format; without hypertext, putting a full-length citation inline would be a mess. On Wikipedia, however, readers can see a citation by hovering over (desktop) or tapping (mobile) the number alongside the text. This means the informational value of the citation is more important than its brevity.

There is obviously a limit to this; we don't quote entire chapters (even public-domain ones) in citations, because it's too unwieldy in hypertext. However, there's no real argument for using an "author surname and date only" format over using one that includes all the information necessary to identify the work. Some editors argue the sfn template includes all the information necessary to identify the work, because another step of hypertext allows the reader to place exactly what work does so, but this falters when considered with the prior section -- why would we expect readers to identify that this bluelink goes to another reference? We've spent years training readers to expect that bluelinks are links to different articles, and it's poor design to expect them to know they're something else in this particular context.

Visual Editor
sfn is not usable in the Visual Editor. This is a known issue for as long as they've both existed, and not any meaningful priority to fix. Visual Editor is the default way infrequent editors interact with editing; an article using sfn is not approachable to the long tail of the editor base. A minority of experienced editors also use VE, for reasons such as preferring a WYSIWYG interface or finding it more convenient for simple copyedits, and sfn is equally inaccessible to this subset.