Should you cite your sources when putting factual info in your VN?

[robokarla]

I'm currently working on a project that involves characters sharing animal facts. I'd like to cite sources & give credit, but I'm not sure what best practices are.

Obviously it doesn't make sense to do something like "Did you know cheetahs can run up to 35 miles per hour [1]?"

I'm thinking of providing credits at the end, like "Animal Facts: [Website Name]"

Has anyone done this before? Does anyone have tips for doing this smoothly?

[parttimestorier]

I think just listing it in the credits of the game would be fine, or maybe putting something on your game's page that says "All animal facts in the game come from this website." I like to credit anything that helps me at all too, so when I used some details about how to play a specific board game that I had looked up online in one of my projects, I just included boardgamegeek.com in the special thanks section. I don't think anyone is going to tell you you're doing it wrong regardless of what you decide, since visual novels aren't academia and you don't strictly need to cite your sources. You can just make your own choice about what works for you.

If you like the idea of doing real footnotes though, you could consider using this code or something similar to make a glossary! Then the player could choose to bring up a note for information on the animal fact if they want to, or skip it if they're not interested. Maybe you could even include extra detail about the animals as well as your sources!

[Mutive]

I second the idea of citing sources in your credits. It keeps the citations from disrupting the game play while also showing that you've done your research (and giving credit where due).

[Imperf3kt]

If you've pulled info directly from somewhere, such as Wikipedia, it's actually a legal requirement to cite the source anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

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[robokarla]

Thanks all, I appreciate your responses. It's good to have some perspectives on this from other VN creators. I think that the credits idea will probably be the one that sticks, as it appears to be the most commonly used one. Thanks again!