A couple of days ago I added a little detail to the wikipedia Pitchfork entry. The detail was that in some parts of Ireland (the bits where my wife comes from, for example) a 4 pronged pitch fork is called a sprong.
I searched all over the internet but I couldn't find this (rivetting and useful) fact. I turned to wikipedia and (strangely) sprong does not have it's own entry. Pitchfork does and it specifically mentions that in some parts of England, Pitchforks are called Prongs. This seemed like the approprite place to add this very interesting fact. So i did.
My browser crashed the other day and when it reopened it reloaded the wikipedia page. And LO AND BEHOLD someone has put a [citation needed] thingy next to it. I understand why - it could look like I've just made up this fact. In fact, I thought my wife made it up and that was why I first went looking on the internet. To be honest I didn't trust my wife enough to believe that it's a real world - some times she takes the piss out of me - so I've also had this fact independantly verified from bonefide people whom I am not married to (nor related to by marriage).
So here was my problem: if I read the wikipedia rules correctly then my citation needs to reference a webpage or a book or a journal or similiar ... not my wife or her dodgy relative.
Bugger. I spoke to my wife and she said that if I was really that worried about it then she would ring her Mum and get her to look up the word sprong in the old Irish dictionary they keep on top of the fridge behind the Irish farmer's journal.
I didn't want to do that unless it gave them more ammunition to mock me with . They already mock me about my missing vowels (somewhere way back the people who migrated to New Zealand collectively had a vowel movement and every vowel except i sounds like i and i sounds like something else).
I was almost defeated but then I remembered google books! Two minutes later, I found this snippet from English as we speak it in Ireland by Patrick Weston Joyce which, in case you are wondering, was published in 1920:
Halleluja.
What bothers me, though, is this: if it weren't for Google books then my fact may not be true.
