[WikiEN-l] good example of overuse of {{fact}}

David Boothroyd david at election.demon.co.uk
Sun Oct 15 19:03:42 UTC 2006


On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:26:46 +0100, Arwel Parry 
<arwel at 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]]
-- 
David Boothroyd - http://www.election.demon.co.uk
david at election.demon.co.uk (home)
dboothroyd at westminster.gov.uk (council)



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