Just to add my methodology to the conversation/confusion. When I first started OHM editing I was adding the full source citation to source=* including the url where available. Multiple sources were separated by a semi-colon. Maybe I got this from a misintepretation of the OHM wiki, or another users contributions, or just plain ignorance, I’m not sure.
I recently realised this was a lot of work, not sustainable, and difficult to read. I may have breached a character count occasionally as well without realising it.
It seems that a better way (or at least simpler) is to adopt an academic citation methodology where the in-text source is abbreviated with a unique ‘year-author/title’ reference in source=* (again separated by semicolons for multiples) that is fully expanded elsewhere with url, attribution, mapwarper id, and explanatory notes as necessary. The elsewhere I’m using is the community project page for the area I am working on and is linked via source:url=*, examples:
relation - Relation: C to 1878 (2749498) | OpenHistoricalMap
project - Open Historical Map/Projects/Newcastle - OpenStreetMap Wiki (note I have not been including licensing but will correct that)
This is something akin to the source:name=* with source:url=* recommendation
Sources that are not of broad use (eg a newspaper article) generally wouldn’t be referenced this way but via a full attribution using source=*, although I would adopt whatever method comes from this discussion.
Obvious flaws with this method are that it is a double-step process for a later user and relies on the reference list url/page being maintained and not corrupted in the future, although the abbreviated reference is still useful (if well written) as there are usually a limited number of sources that mappers for that area should also be familiar with. I’d argue that a project reference page is highly useful to document how an area has been mapped and possibly more useful than the fragmented ‘source=full attribution’ approach as the story behind the mapping can be documented or at least be more evident.
Also missing from this method is the tagging of the sources for the various aspects of a feature, e.g. the location may be from one source (a map) but the start_date comes from elsewhere. Dealing with start_date is easy with start_date:source=, but is there a convention for ‘location’ or geometry, as in geometry:source=? I am guilty of loading up fixme=* and notes=* with some of this stuff, or wikipedia=* if that is where some of the source data resides. Also, given the discussion of indexing, I’m now not sure that my use of semi-colons is appropriate.