I find the footnote function on Arcanawiki to be somewhat frustrating. While there are definitely times it's useful, for the most part I think the vast majority of instances where one might use a footnote are actually better served by other methods.
I would appreciate it if my fellow arcanists could please make an effort to reduce the use of footnotes in new pages going forward.
- Side comments, clarifications, and small additional details can usually be stuffed inside parenthesis.
- In cases where that would make a sentence unwieldy or hard to follow, you can usually get away with making a new sentence to follow it up, or sometimes a new paragraph.
- Really long tangential footnotes are often worth having as their own sub-section, headed up by two or three "+" symbols to make them stand out.
The main reason I'm proposing these changes is because I've recently had several instances where I saw something I wanted to edit or expand on, but it was in a foot note. Often said footnote just so happened to be anchored in a paragraph with additional footnotes in it. I've even had situations where I wanted to edit a sentence in the main body of an article, but that sentence had one or more lengthy footnotes in the middle of it. While these look pretty clean in the normal viewing of a page, once you open up the editor they become a royal mess and much harder to work with. I'm of the opinion that footnotes here should be a tool of last resort, as that approach will make it much easier on those who edit after us.