User talk:Ericpart

Birmingham City season pages
Hello, and thank you for the corrections you've been making to Birmingham City season pages. I'm a bit confused by the change you've made to the attendance figure for the FA Cup third-place playoff. The 1971–72 Birmingham City F.C. season page sources the attendances from Tony Matthews' 2010 Complete Record (see 1971–72 Birmingham City F.C. season, listed under the General subheading), specifically page 483, which says 25841. As does Matthews' 1995 book, as does the English National Football Archive (ENFA). So I'm wondering where you're getting 23841 from? cheers, Struway2 (talk) 16:16, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Hello I am currently updating my personal chronology of Birmingham City’s history by referring to my own extensive programme collection and the British Newspaper Archive plus other resources via various search engines. I was attempting to establish who were the scorers in penalty shoot out of the 3rd / 4th place play off final and noticed from my research that more media accredited 23841 as the attendance than 25841 including figures issued by the club. I acknowledge that while Tony Matthews is obviously a respected statistician with much published work and I am acquainted personally with him, his work is not infallible and there are several errors his two Complete History volumes on Birmingham City so I am always cautious. He does not have access to my collection 3000+ issues of Birmingham match day programmes which gives me an advantage I suppose. I have come across a number of minor discrepancies on Wikipedia of late which I have changed. Referring to the Associate Members Cup as the Football League Trophy which is a more modern derivative but in 1991 was still known by the former mentioned title was one recent change I spotted and changed which no one queried. When I am able I will check the physical copies of the Sports Argus newspaper which reported on the match itself but they are in storage at the moment. For your interest, up until recently before key figures the media department at BCFC who had been in post for over 20 years were made redundant, I was their source for fact checking, historical data and memorabilia, indeed for several years I have contributed to the club’s match day programme and website with a variety of quizzes, articles and trivia. I am not the club’s official historian but am probably the closest they have got who is willing to offer his time and resources so freely. Please feel free to return the attendance to it’s original figure if you consider my change to be incorrect until I can triple check my initial findings. If you prefer, I will resist making any further changes to any data on BCFC related pages and will flag them up to you instead. Regards Eric Partridge 86.174.64.159 (talk) 18:04, 24 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your reply. Given your username, I'd wondered whether you were Eric Partridge.
 * Thing is, the whole basis of Wikipedia is that it doesn't publish original research: its content is supposed to verifiable with reference to reliable published sources. Mr Matthews' works certainly contain typographical errors and inconsistencies, and I have no reason to believe your suggested figure to be incorrect, but without a credible published alternative, I think we're stuck with it.
 * However, if you have something published by the club that could be cited as a source for 23841, a programme or handbook perhaps, or media that you think more likely to be correct than Mr Matthews or his proofreaders, we could use that as a source.
 * Please don't stop making corrections, they're very welcome. If it's something more significant than fixing my typos, it'd help if you could make a note of where the info comes from (fancy formatting not needed). cheers, Struway2 (talk) 19:05, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi You have the advantage of me sir, name wise. Able to reveal? Do we know each other? Is this conversation in the public domain? 86.174.64.159 (talk) 19:17, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
 * We don't know each other, but I've worked on BCFC-related stuff on here for a long time, which involves having read enough BCFC-related stuff to recognise names. This conversation is in the public domain, so I'm not going to reveal :) cheers, Struway2 (talk) 19:25, 24 January 2021 (UTC)