Forums > MobyGames > Opinions requested: Public citations
Emitewiki (547) on 9/28/2023 1:13 AM · Permalink · Report
Hi, there!
I'm hoping to get a feel for what members of the Moby community would prefer for styles of public citations!
Currently, when submitting information about, say, a developer or company, citations for pieces of information can be included in the "Proof" field at the end of the submission. This information is only visible to approvers, and it helps them verify submitted information is correct. This is great! In addition to having the private "Proof" field, TracyPoff (one of Moby's main developers) indicated on Discord that there could be potential for adding a more public citation system depending on the preferences of the community.
Whats the benefit of having public citations in the first place?
Great question! Public citations, while not strictly necessary, can have a variety of useful benefits including:
- Allowing future users/readers to see where the information came from so that they can continue their own research from those sources.
- Giving new readers peace of mind about the veracity of the information.
- Allowing future contributors to know what has already been read and cited before adding their own info.
- Potentially giving a more "professional" look to the information provided.
Personally, I love having citations publically available in order to do additional reading on topics and for other reasons listed above.
The question at hand
If public citations were implemented as a loose sort of "policy" consistently, what type of citations would we as a community want?
Some common styles of citing information include:
- Footnotes - This is commonly seen in places like Wikipedia, and it often includes bracketed numbers such as this [1] that link to a list of references at the bottom of the page. (TracyPoff has indicated it is possible to add that functionality to the site, even though it is not present now.)
- Parenthetical references - It could become standard policy to insert abbreviated citations at the end of sentences, in forms such as (Site, Author, date)
- Hyperlinks - Links directly to sources could be included in the text, such as something like [John Smith's blog](https://therealjohnsmith.com). (TracyPoff has indicated that they can turn hyperlinks on in the text areas so that users could utilize them and have them displayed.)
- In-text attributions - We could use prose to directly reference sources in the text, such as "According to a 2012 Kotaku article, John Smith was...."
The goal of this thread is to determine the community's interest in having the option for public-facing citations and if there is interest, what type of citations the community would want. Thanks for taking the time to read and comment! 😀
Koterminus (252270) on 10/10/2023 4:57 PM · Permalink · Report
By far the most common type of correction requests that we receive are "release info errors" corrections submitted by people who disagree with the release date we have on file for a game. There might be many reasons they disagree with the date (maybe Wikipedia lists a different date to us, or maybe the person who added the game to Moby just made a typo that was overlooked by an approver), but it is quite often the case that we have concrete evidence on file that our release date is correct, but the person filing the correction simply doesn't know it because they can't see where we got the date from. Introducing a citation system for release dates would save both approvers and regular contributors a lot of time in this area, as well as go a long way towards improving our reputation as a trustworthy and accurate database.
Trivia submissions would also benefit greatly from having public citations. There have been many times where I've read an interesting trivia item but have been left wondering about its validity because no source was mentioned. Of course, as an approver, I can just go into the backend and view the source that the contributor included with the submission, but I believe the public should be able to benefit from that knowledge too.
In either case, I think footnote-style citations (like Wikipedia) would look the neatest and would be most familiar to those who are already used to editing similar databases. While reading a sentence like "In the early stages of its development, Blaster-X was conceptualized as a submarine game[1] before it evolved into a war simulator[2]", I can easily see that there are links to supporting evidence there which don't interrupt the flow of the sentence.
I'm not sure what other types of submissions would benefit from having public citations (maybe developer biographies?). I will say that it seems redundant to allow citations in game descriptions, because in the vast majority of cases the information in game descriptions comes from the game itself, or footage of the game.
Cantillon (77998) on 10/11/2023 5:22 AM · Permalink · Report
I agree with everything above.
Another type of submission that would benefit might be credits. I a manual or credit roll says "Michael Johnson", it might nog be obvious why exactly we linked it to Michael Johnson 1234, and some extra proof there might be handy.
WONDERなパン (16778) on 10/31/2023 11:08 PM · Permalink · Report
I'm in support of this but I think there might need to be a few areas of focus first so that we have a better, more reliable system in place for supporting this.
If right now you were to go look at all of our sources from past approval comments on submissions - you'd find an absolute ton of deadlinks. Past content is pretty much a crapshoot in terms of confirming old sources. Sure, many, many things are already Waybacked or archived in some manner and many of us on both the contribution side and the approval side try to Wayback as we work. That said, it is spotty at best. Here is a great example (and the first game I grabbed), just on the critic reviews page - 16/21 of the "full review" URLs are dead. https://www.mobygames.com/game/7776/defender/reviews/ This is one of the few visible forms of sources anyone can go view today.
I think we should,
1.) Get auto-URL archival setup so that links are automatically Waybacked without anyone having to fuss. If we cannot automate this (I honestly have no clue!) then we should make it a step you have to click through/acknowledge that you agree to archive any links before clicking submit. All sources must go through some form of URL/website archival through a third party.
2.) Set up deadlink sniffing/detection so it can be listed on our Most Wanted list. Give people points who can re-source entries/data with archived links.
This would provide a good way forward to better support your suggestion and also offers an incentivized path for cleaning up old deadlinks. There may need to be more backend work to make a variety of different citation options even feasible, but I think sourcing needs a bigger review/overhaul regardless of any other decision.