On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:26:46 +0100, Arwel Parry arwel@cartref.demon.co.uk writes:

I find it very frustrating trying to cite commonly known events.

On [[FA Premier League]] someone {{fact}}ed the sentence "UEFA, European football's governing body, lifted the ban on English clubs playing in European competitions in 1990 and the Taylor Report on stadium safety standards, which proposed expensive upgrades to all-seater stadiums, was published in January of that year." What are they asking to be cited? UEFA lifting the ban can be checked by looking at any article on English clubs' participation in continental competitions. The Taylor Report is well known and referred to in any number of places on the web, but despite looking for hours on UK Government sites I've completely failed to find the original document. I eventually settled for citing the 1994 order requiring certain stadia to be all-seater.

Have fixed that for you. Official reports are normally Command Papers and all that is needed is the number which is prefixed by variations on an abbreviation of 'Command' depending on the series (they run from 1 to 9999 before adopting a new one). This one is Cmnd. 962.

I would say the canonical example of "Political correctness gone mad" in the UK is the banning of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" which is referred to as fact time after time, but remains purely apocryphal. Try to {{fact}} that and you will run up against that old problem of proving a negative. There are lots of references claiming it happened, though.

[[en:User:Fys]]