On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 11:58 AM, Anthony Cole ahcoleecu@gmail.com wrote:
Most editions of most books published in the last 40 years (certainly books from reliable publishers) have an ISBN that identifies one edition. Most reliable journal articles these days have a doi. For simple citing of web pages, you could automatically convert bare urls to archived versions of the cited web page.
I do agree with you. But the problem emerges if you want to cite the reference (the book, the article) as an item. There you have to take into account a "book model" in Wikidata, and it's easier said than done. (scientific articles are a bit easier, and Magnus is working on them). https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Source_MetaData
Aubrey