Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-61022-20160212185107

So I was checking out the Wikipedia entry for Chris Claremont today and I noticed that on top of reference tags they also have notations that work the same way. (If you scroll down to the second on his comics career from 1969-1991 it's used when they reference his first comic book credit). Taking a look at how this functions, I think it would be a very useful tool to have. Whenever I've done detailed notes on specific things in my various expanded history pages, I usually stuck them in the reference tag, which makes them kind of big and chunky.... I thinking adopting notations will be helpful to expand on things that otherwise are condensed or followed by chunky things in brackets.

I was looking at the Wikipedia code and it operates like a number of our usual tags

How practical could this be? Well take a look at this Reference #44 of my entry on Spider-Man. Instead of one tag with all that chunky information we could break it up. The actual reference as the original reference then all that additional data could be in a notation tag that follows thereafter.

It has it's uses when stories have been retold multiple times with certain facts or elements that have been changed, or when something gets undone after the fact (A character dying for example). People who want to know what issue its in can go to the issue, but there are additional notations for people to read up in greater detail.

Another practical use is if we're talking about something that is revealed later on and don't want to intentionally spoil it or disrupt the narrative flow but it's not a specific reference to a comic, then we can put it in a notation. For example, when I write about periods where Lyja was posing as Alicia Masters, I usually don't explaining that it's a Skrull impostor in the actual sentence, especially when the "reveal" is mentioned later on. Explaining it while in the middle of narrating an event sometimes breaks the flow. With a notation tag would allow me to insert that information.

Obviously implementing this is going to require some coding so the notation tags appear in the main body and they are listed at the bottom of the page (preferably in a heading separate from other references) but I think it would be a useful tool to have if we can program it in. 