Provenance

Provenance: context relevant to the use and sourcing of a statement, claim, or data point.

Related ideas: context propagation in software or other telephone games; the whole tale of an experiment, relevant to thorough reproduction; the environment of a [possibly ancient] document, allowing for its deciphering; the history of light reaching a telescope allowing for reconstruction of properties of its source.

In citation[edit]

A simple citation is one step in a provenance tree -- the last source an author looked before repeating a claim. A more fully contextualized citation might include a) a deep link to the claim in the source being repeated, b) a full provenance history traversing a series of such links as far back as they go, c) description of why the source is an appropriate one for the claim in this context, and d) cross-reference to other uses of that source to support that claims, or as a source for related claims.

a) Deep linking: currently the WP standard for sourcing is roughly to the article or book level. Annotation standards in contrast have developed many precise ways to describe the targets of a note.

b) Full provenance trees: This is aided by deep linking, but can be done by hand without. The central question is whether the source indicates its source for the related claim.

c) There is a rough attempt at this, category by category, among editors who discuss reliable sources on talk pages and similar spaces. This is rarely specified in a formal way, and never included or hinted at in citations themselves (at best, currently, in a narrow discussion about that cite in edit summaries and talk pages, or blanket discussions about the reliability of a source). Easy to fix with a template field, if structured data about {cite, context reliability} is available.

d) Backlinks tracing where and how a source is used are starting to be available via WikiCite. Within some sets of literature (like scholarly articles) similar views can be found using commercial data tools.