What is the cite attribute for?

Question

The cite attribute specifies the address of the source of the quoted text, I think, but who uses this information?

For example:

Answer 1

It's just another meta data chunk that can be used by server side scripts to collect statistics or by front end developpers to add functionnalities (they can choose to print the source, allow to access the original source, etc...).

It's just a good practice to have the original source written somewhere although it is actually not very useful for the end user.