How wiki and works pages cite their sources. Two requirements meet in one mechanism: editorial verifiability (every claim traceable) and copyright transparency (every CC BY-SA fact visibly attributed).
The companion to this document is website/schema/wiki-schema.md, which defines fieldSources for structured frontmatter fields. This file defines the prose-side mechanism.
Markup
Standard markdown footnotes, inline in the prose, with a References section auto-collected at the end of the file by markdown-it.
Sophia Tolstaya was born on 3 October 1844 in Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo.[^1]
She was Tolstoy's wife of 48 years and principal manuscript copyist.[^2]
[^1]: Jubilee Edition, vol. 83, p. 12. (PD)
[^2]: tolstoydigital/TEI, `personList.xml` entry Q2917962. (CC BY-SA 4.0)
No prefix on the footnote ID. No custom shortcode. Markdown-it handles the rendering; Obsidian renders the same syntax natively in preview.
One footnote per claim-cluster, not per word. A single sentence may carry one footnote even when it asserts several facts, provided they all come from the same source.
The licence tag rule
Every footnote ends with a parenthetical licence tag. This is what makes the mechanism do double duty as copyright transparency.
| Tag | Meaning |
|---|---|
(PD) |
Public domain. No restrictions. |
(CC BY-SA 4.0) |
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. |
(CC BY 4.0) |
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. |
(fair use) |
Used under fair use / fair dealing. Provide rationale on the source card. |
(restricted) |
Used by permission. Do not redistribute the source text. |
A footnote with no tag is a lint error. The tag is the contract: the reader can see the copyright status of every fact without leaving the page, and a downstream republisher can filter for compliance.
Toggle behaviour
Footnotes are off by default. The site is for reading; verification is on demand.
Two states, cycled by a small button in the page header:
| State | Prose | Page footer |
|---|---|---|
| Off (default) | Clean. No [1] markers visible. |
“Sources used on this page” summary block — one line per unique source, with licence tag. |
| On | Wikipedia-style [1] markers. |
Full “References” section with every footnote. |
State persists in localStorage so a reader who turns it on stays in that mode across the site.
CSS does the swap. JavaScript is ~15 lines: cycle the data-sources="off|on" attribute on <html> and persist it. No framework, no dependency.
The summary block (off-state footer) is auto-generated at build time by collecting the unique sources referenced in the footnotes, deduplicated and ordered by first appearance. It is not a frontmatter field — there is nothing to maintain.
Source IDs and source cards
Footnote text uses plain prose. The structured registry lives in website/src/sources/ — one source card per major source, as defined in wiki-schema.md. Footnotes can wikilink the source name to its card:
[^3]: [[Birukoff Biography]], vol. 1, p. 22. (PD)
This gives a reader who clicks through a stable destination (the source card) that describes the source itself.
A future lint step may enforce that every wikilinked source in a footnote resolves to an existing source card. Not required for source mode to ship.
Relationship to fieldSources frontmatter
Two parallel mechanisms, both kept:
| Mechanism | Where | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
fieldSources: frontmatter |
YAML | Per-structured-field citation for dates, identifiers, etc. Machine-readable. Used by indexes, exports, and integrity checks. |
[^n] prose footnotes |
body | Per-prose-claim citation for narrative content. Human-readable. Surfaced through source mode. |
A page that has both is fully cited. A page with only fieldSources is structurally cited but the prose is uncited — acceptable for recordStatus: draft, not acceptable for recordStatus: verified.
What source mode does not do
It does not assert that the page’s prose is itself CC BY-SA. The prose remains under the project’s SDG dedication. The licence tag in a footnote describes the source of the fact, not the page that cites it. Facts are not copyrightable; citing a CC BY-SA source does not propagate ShareAlike to the citing page. See LICENSE for the boundary rules.
It does not replace page-level attribution. The footer summary in the off-state is the page-level attribution display — it satisfies the attribution (BY) obligation regardless of whether a reader ever turns footnotes on.