Can we please stop the “verbose references” edits?

Question

There is at least one user who has been editing posts to make links into footnotes containing the references as full text (including links).

Can we please officially discourage this practice?

This is not how hypertext works: links replace footnote references. The are technically superior. Printed texts use footnotes because they cannot have hypertext links. But text on the internet doesn’t have this restriction.

Footnote links are user-unfriendly because instead of just hovering over the link, or clicking on it to get to the linked information, the user has to perform the manual operation of looking up a numeric reference further down the page.

Apart from that, footnotes simply increase the text size at no (or little) gain.

I do think that having a “references” section may make sense in answers. But this isn’t generally true, and unless there’s a compelling reason, links should not be replaced by footnotes. In fact, I have already rolled back such an edit performed by somebody else on my own post. I won’t roll back edits on other posts without a consensus, which I’m seeking here.

Answer 1

I didn't check all cases, but in the ones I saw the original link was not removed, only the footnote reference added. Both, the inline mention of the article and the full citation were links. There is no functionality lost there, you can still click or hover over the original link.

To me, the footnote citations are useful to quickly check which papers are cited without having to click on every link. Hovering over the link usually tells me the journal name at most, often only the publisher. In many of my posts I use them myself, but always with an inline link as well. They don't replace hypertext links, they are complementary.

There were a few cases where the full citation was added inline, I do disagree with that usage. We should stick to standard nomenclature here (Rudolph et. al, 2012) or explicity mention the title in the text, not put full citations inline.

Changing links to DOIs is generally a good idea, not all scientific publishers seem to place a lot of value on keeping their links stable. If the link is to a different source of the paper (e.g. free full text on PMC or the authors homepage) that link should be preserved, not replaced.