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FWIW, the legal community has been dealing with citability for a few centuries.

In criminal cases, people's lives are on the line. In class-action civil lawsuits, billions of dollars are at stake.

This wheel most-definitely does not need re-inventing.

Flagging this article for it's total lack of content.

That's a false analogy. The legal community deals with well-documented, stable, and easily cited statutes. There are strong incentives driving clear presentation of current law. The objectives outlined in the OP would not be served by those incentives, because they are concerned with all government documents, whether they have made their way into law yet or not. Such documents can be unstable and hard to find, so providing clearinghouse through which they can be cited in a time-aware fashion would be incredibly useful for tracking the evolution of proposed laws.

I was talking about citations on the web but agree with your point. Quick access to cited material means more time devoted to solving the client's problem (or serving more clients - both are good outcomes).

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