Forum:Notes and references

Our standard Footer for person pages has a "Sources and notes" heading, which comes above "Contributors". There would be value in reversing that order, so that editors can add manual notes under the "Sources and notes" heading. That would be particularly useful in articles that use Wikipedia material and often have a "Notes" and/or "References" and/or "Sources" section based on WP: that material could be simply moved to follow the footer, stripped of its heading(s).

However, a further complication has arisen from Wikipedia's relatively recent (2014?) development of multiple reference groups. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Footnotes, particularly from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Footnotes#Footnotes:_groups. An example is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Devereux_(died_1305) - which we have at http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Walter_Devereux_of_Bodenham_(c1266-1305)?oldid=1260213 (choosing that version to illustrate what happens if we currently move all the WP refs to follow the footer without their WP headings).

I wonder whether our "Sources and notes", in addition to being moved so that manually-added material can logically follow it, should be renamed "Footnotes" so that WP headings such as "Sources" and "Notes" can follow it without seeming repetitive. The place for renaming is presumably near the top of http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Showfacts_notes/main?action=edit.

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 21:40, October 9, 2016 (UTC)