I am finding this exchange really disturbing. Mostly because people are individually creating approaches to both the organization of the text and the citation of sources, resulting in a slew of different visual presentations that, frankly, I find really frustrating and difficult to follow.
Most of y'all know that I've been beating the drum of developing at least some guidelines (if not standards) for organizing the text on profile pages-- especially profiles of the historically significant folks. This exchange about footnoting (or not) and how to do it, in my mind, further underscores the need for some sort of guidelines for all of us to follow. We are not creating profile pages for our own benefit but for the benefit of others; it behooves us then to make it easy for them to understand our work.
On sources, specifically, when I'm reading a profile, first off, I want to see sources for the information written. Where did this birth date come from? How do we know these were her parents? And I'd like to be able to click on a footnote number attached to a fact or claim that takes me to a very direct display of the source information. I also expect to see that source displayed in at least something approaching the AP style guide (and, due to my genealogy training, something that approaches the models in Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills).
After no sources at all, few things bug me more than making it difficult to see/comprehend what source information is available. I have despised (possibly too strong a word) the S#1234 model being used at wikitree. I understand that it's related to how wikitree translates uploaded GEDCOM data, but where I can (and as my time permits), I go through the Puritan Great Migration profile pages and convert these S#1234 references to standard footnotes. (This assumes, of course, that there is ANY source information on said profiles; most of the time, there isn't.)
I also strongly believe, generally, in making it easy for a user to use a given system. If I click on a link, I expect it to take me directly to information about that link, not to another link. I do not want to have to click multiple times to find what I'm seeking. If I click on a footnote on a profile page, I expect to see information about the source, not an S#1234 reference. I want to be able to see very easily that the birth date came from Such-and-so Parish Record, London, England, volume 3, p 329, etc.; and then I want to be able to have an easy way to get back to where I was reading. This profile still needs work, but gets at what I'm describing: Amzi Doolittle Sr.
The industry standard of footnoting in print seems perfectly appropriate here in cyberspace also, with the additional benefit of online including hyper links to the actual source (or a digital representation of it). Why we would want to make it more difficult and confusing to the reader is beyond me. And most of the examples included in the responses here do just that. In the absence of standards/guidelines specific to wikitree, it seems to make most sense to follow industry standards than each person coming up with their own preferred way of doing things.
Related: Current use of the subheaders Sources and Footnotes contributes to the confusion. We should use one OR the other for cited references. Then use a separate subheader for identifying additional sources of information that are NOT already cited, where the reader can turn to for more information. Or something, but we need to figure that out, too.
