Just sharing an opinion here, you're welcome to disagree. I feel that the footnote function on the site is at best a double-edged sword.
At times it can be helpful to tuck a small note away at the bottom of the page rather than have it disrupt the flow of a paragraph. Footnotes definitely have their place, and I wouldn't call for an all out ban. In fact, I use them myself every so often.
That said, I think we collectively tend to over-use them. I frequently encounter two problems that footnotes cause:
- They make it harder for other users to edit the page you made.
- 1A) If someone wants to edit something that's in a footnote, they have to hunt all over the page to figure out where the thing they're trying to edit is buried.
- 1B) If someone wants to edit something that's not in a footnote but is in a heavily-footnoted paragraph, it still raises the difficulty of that edit. It's harder to get a sense for the flow of a sentence you're editing if that sentence is broken up into two or three pieces by lengthy footnotes.
- The footnotes at the bottom of the page lack context. But if they catch your eye, trying to figure out where on the page above that footnote is anchored can be perplexingly difficult, and often that missing context is highly important to the meaning of the footnote.
Personally, when I'm using Arcanawiki, I don't always read articles exhaustively. Sometimes I skim them quickly looking for the most useful nuggets, especially if I've followed a quick link from another page that was the main topic I had intended to read about. Sometimes I refer back for a refresher on an article I'd read months ago that has recently become relevant to my campaign. There are also a few beloved pages that I follow and check in on regularly whenever the site notifies me that someone has added more information or cool new ideas to them. In all those cases, a cryptic sentence fragment in a footnote at the bottom of the page has astounding powers to derail me. :)
I would encourage my fellow users to avoid using footnotes in situations where the potentially-footnoted-statement could just as easily be demarcated with parenthesis. If the thing you were planning to put in a footnote would work just fine as a new sentence in the main text, please consider doing that instead.
Likewise, when using footnotes, I would encourage my fellow editors to consider whether or not the footnote makes sense when encountered without context at the bottom of the page. Cryptic incomplete-sentence footnotes can sometimes be rendered completely intelligible by just adding one or two extra words. If that's the case, please phrase them so that they make sense when read on their own. If doing so would cause the footnote to greatly grow in length, then please consider whether or not the article would be better served by the footnote becoming it's own paragraph or sub-section of the article, rather than a displaced snippet.
Thank you for considering this suggestion. I realize it's entirely possible these are just my pet peeves, but I really do feel like footnotes can at time be problematic, especially on longer articles or when an article of more modest length has more than 2 or 3 footnotes.