Gretsch 
We all know how it works, the years tend to simplify events. Each year they become simpler because there are less people who remembers, or are around t remember, details of what happened. Some events can be simplified, like "Messi scored 3 goals against..." or "Donald Trumps hair looked silly as usual," while other events contains so many pieces of conflicting information that they remain a mystery.
You can not for instance write in Encyclopedia Britannica that "Julius Ceasar burned down the library in Alexandria because he was angry and drunk" although it might be true. We don't know.
Hmmm. An interesting meditation on historiography.
Otherwise...
Precisian's Note 1: years do not "simplify events," they remove those who look back at them from
- the original context;
- access to much corollary information.
Precisian's Note 2: not sure what one can "write in the Encyclopedia Britannica" but FWIW, this is what is included in Wiki's entry "Library of Alexandria":
Destruction
Main article: Destruction of the Library of Alexandria
The famous burning of the Library of Alexandria, including the incalculable loss of ancient works, has become a symbol of the irretrievable loss of public knowledge. Although there is a mythology of "the burning of the Library at Alexandria", the library may have suffered several fires or acts of destruction of varying degrees over many years. Ancient and modern sources identify several possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
During [the so-called] Caesar[s'] Civil War, Julius Caesar was besieged at Alexandria in 48 BC. Many ancient sources describe Caesar setting fire to his own ships and state that this fire spread to the library, destroying it.
[W]hen the enemy endeavored to cut off his communication by sea, he was forced to divert that danger by setting fire to his own ships, which, after burning the docks, thence spread on and destroyed the great library.
— Plutarch, Life of Caesar
Bolstering this claim, in the 4th century both the pagan historian Ammianus and the Christian historian Orosius wrote that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina had been destroyed by Caesar's fire. However, Florus and Lucan claim that the flames Caesar set burned only the fleet and some "houses near the sea".
The library seems to have continued in existence to some degree until its contents were largely lost during the taking of the city by the Emperor Aurelian (AD 270–275), who was suppressing a revolt by Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. During the course of the fighting, the areas of the city in which the main library was located were damaged. Some sources claim that the smaller library located at the Serapeum survived, though Ammianus Marcellinus wrote of the library in the Serapeum temple as a thing of the past, destroyed when Caesar sacked Alexandria.
Paganism was made illegal by an edict of the Emperor Theodosius I in AD 391. The temples of Alexandria were closed by Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria in AD 391. The historian Socrates of Constantinople describes that all pagan temples in Alexandria were destroyed, including the Serapeum. Since the Serapeum had at one time housed a part of the Great Library, some scholars believe that the remains of the Library of Alexandria were destroyed at this time. However, it is not known how many, if any, books were contained in it at the time of destruction, and contemporary scholars do not mention the library directly.
In AD 642, Alexandria was captured by the Muslim army of 'Amr ibn al-'As. Several later Arabic sources describe the library's destruction by the order of Caliph Omar. Bar-Hebraeus, writing in the 13th century, quotes Omar as saying to Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī: "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them." Later scholars are skeptical of these stories, given the range of time that had passed before they were written down and the political motivations of the various writers.
As such, one would not include a sentence such as "Julius Ceasar burned down the library in Alexandria because he was angry and drunk" in any encyclopedia whose publishers/purveyors wished it to be reputable not because "we don't know," but because that's not the kinda thang (stylistically and in terms of presentation of info) that is good for a general reference work's credibility, even though it is kinda funny and at least in the general ballpark of the truth.
You can also not write in an Autosport article that Schumacher used traction control racing his Benneton B194 although it might be true.
There are several ways to include such a claim in an Autosport article, and one would be "Many of Benetton's opponents on the grid suspected that Michael's B194 was illegally rigged with traction control."
