Complicated Citations: Just Stop

Every high school and college student has had the displeasure of wrangling bibliographies (or "works cited" sections, excuse me) for whatever citation format their discipline and educational institution embraces. Whether it's MLA, APA, Chicago, or whatever Ms. Turabian decided to unleash upon the world, no citation format is easy to write or intuitive to read, especially if you're trying to cite an Internet source that isn't a periodical or a database.

Nobody has time for that

If the point of citations and a bibliography is to help you find stuff, then just use the universal identifiers and dispose of all the other cruft that can easily be looked up. Don't bother including all these weird fields like publishing city; just provide directions to find what you're talking about. If certain fields to need to be included (like author or date), don't use some crazy FORTRAN-style blob; use a table with headers for what the fields mean or, you know, words.

For web pages (which are overwhelmingly what students are going to want to cite), URLs should be all we need. Of course, the world isn't forever, URLs change. Maybe freeze it in the Wayback Machine or provide some search keywords that produce the desired page as the first result.

For books, include an ISBN and optimally a link to an eBook/PDF. Hunting down a rare book or one with a super-generic title is not fun.

For scholarly articles, anything worth citing should have a DOI. Include a URL of at least the abstract. Hopefully the actual article isn't behind a paywall!

Sadly, it isn't likely that schools are going to give up formal citation schemes soon. Accepting multiple formats would be a doable step in the right direction.