Adding citation (with URL) to quote to make fact-checking easier?

Spec
1

I’m a newbie so apologies in advance if this isn’t the correct location to flag this. I searched Google, commonmark.org, & discourse.org, but haven’t found anything yet.

Citing a URL in addition to just a name or article title means readers can easily check your source & read further if they choose (I assume it’s also better for SEO).

On phpBB forums, the following BBCode will put a link into the citation:

[quote="In [url=http://example.com/]First Post[/url], Bob"]

On WordPress, the following HTML effectively does the same thing:

<blockquote><cite><a href="http://example.com">First Post</a>, Bob</cite>
Hello this is my quote.
</blockquote>

The screenshot below shows examples of how they render on my forum & blog:

Screenshots%20of%20quotes%20with%20URL%20in%20citation
Screenshots%20of%20quotes%20with%20URL%20in%20citation1170×785 44.7 KB

But I don’t know of any way to do this with CommonMark (or Discourse) :confused:

2 
> In [First Post](http://example.com/), Bob

I don’t think it’s good style to put the attribution inside the blockquote, though.

3

It’s…complicated

1 Like
4

Hm, I guess an extension to Commonmark could treat the first and last paragraph inside a bird track quote as a citation if it follows a certain pattern.

> citation that ends with a colon:
>
> quote

> quote
>
> -- citation in footer introduced by two hyphen-minus characters
3 Likes
5

Slightly modifying Crissov’s proposal, this inline syntax could add a <cite> span anywhere:

[--Citation text]

<cite>Citation text</cite>

The entire citation could become a link as well:

[--Citation text that is also a link](http://example.com)

<cite><a href="http://example.com">Citation text that is also a link</a></cite>