All twelve of Denmark’s national holidays cited the same government document. Eleven of them were badged at our highest assurance grade on the strength of it. The URL was well-formed, sat on the official Danish legal information service, and returned HTTP 200.
It is Bekendtgørelse om fund af højpatogen aviær influenza ved Ørum i Hedensted Kommune — an order concerning a finding of highly pathogenic avian influenza near Ørum, in Hedensted municipality.
Denmark was recorded as fully sourced on a document about poultry.
Three ways a citation fails, and only one of them is visible
| the check | catches | misses this because |
|---|---|---|
| structural — is the URL even shaped like a URL | www.gov.taiwan |
it is perfectly well-formed |
| reachability — does it load | a dead link, a 404 | it loads; it returns 200 |
| reading it | this | — |
That is the whole finding. Two of the three guards were in place and working, and neither could have caught this in principle, because nothing about the citation is broken. A citation is a claim that a specific document says a specific thing, and the only instrument that tests that claim is a person or a process that opens the document and reads it.
Everything short of that tests the plumbing of the citation and reports success.
What was actually true
The corrected sources are a 2023 Act and its accompanying order, which between them abolished store bededag — Great Prayer Day, introduced by royal decree in 1686 — as a public holiday with effect from 1 January 2024.
Our calendar did not hold store bededag. That part had been right all along, which is its own small warning: correct output is not evidence of correct sourcing, and it had been masking a citation that pointed at a completely different subject.
The part that could not be fixed
Denmark has no consolidated statute listing its public holidays. They descend from an eighteenth-century reduction of holy days and from church ordinance, and unlike Sweden there is simply no single instrument to cite for the list.
So all twelve records came down — from our highest grade to the middle one — and Grundlovsdag, which is a banking closure by convention rather than by law, came down further still.
The alternative was available and we did not take it: find any second source that agreed, attach it, and let the grade stand. That is padding a record to clear a threshold, and it produces a number that describes our filing rather than the evidence. The dates are as good as they ever were. What changed is that the label now says what is actually behind them, which for Denmark is custom and convention rather than a law anybody can point to.