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It would also be beneficial to create a template for the citations themselves, again with some kind of "quality" rating, as well as a category (opinion/primary source/secondary/etc) and links to pages about the authors and publications involved. These pages could be used to discuss any perceived bias in the source authors or publications.

Yes to this as well -- same caveat as my comment on the other suggestion. The abiliity for users to rate things in various different, fine-grained ways is part of the design of InstaGov, which is one of my major focuses right now.