Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Citations are an important part of any information ecosystem (so much so that pretty much every post in OLDaily is in essence a citation). They are also core to the reliability and authority of Wikipedia, which has a policy that any assertion be backed with a citation to a published source. This article describes a citation template in use by Wikipedia that has a single parameter: the index of the citation in Wikidata. The Wikidata record, meanwhile, has a range of citation properties that will be familiar to learning designers. The project has a lot readers can dig into - here is the Source MetaData project page, which includes a roadmap, a research bot, and implementation in a programming language called Lua (this is the first I've ever heard of Lua).

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

Copyright 2025
Last Updated: Aug 28, 2025 9:01 p.m.

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