I'm interested after reading the discussion Introduce a "General Reference" close reason on Meta Stack Overflow.
What kinds of questions have been decided "General Reference"? Which have been accepted? Has the close reason generally been accepted or ignored by the community? Do you feel the close reason adds more value or risk, especially in the precedent that it sets?
I think all the meta questions about this close reason have the general-reference tag, you can browse them to see the history and discussion around this topic.
We've usually taken “general reference” to mean “obvious from the Wikipedia article”. We don't use it much; I think we average about once a month.
I do like having the close reason, and I miss it on other SE sites, but I have concerns about it being misused. In particular, I disagree with Borror0's diagram (pushed by Jeff): I don't think Google is a good test for general reference. I won't repeat my full reasoning here. The problem with the Google test is that often the top Google hits look good to potential answerers who know the topic well, but what the asker sees is an explanation that's difficult to understand and may or may not be correct or relevant. This is the crux of the problem: general reference implies that not only the asker can find the answer easily, but the asker must know that they have found a reliable answer. The short version is that general reference should not be “Google it” but “Wikipede it”.
On sites without general reference as a close reason, I sometimes vote to close as “too localized: This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors.” Although the examples in the description of the “too localized” close reason don't apply, general reference questions are bad primarily because they are not helpful to future visitors: future visitors with the same question will have an easier time looking up the answer in the general reference than on Stack Exchange, so there's no need to duplicate the information on Stack Exchange.
Currently, if the answer is able to be found on Wikipedia, IMDB or a Google search where, if you type in the question title exactly and are able to find the answer as one of the results on the first page, it has been voted to close for General reference.
There have been discussion to add Wookipedia, Memory Alpha and other easily find-able wikis to the general reference category, but those have all been denied due to the fact that most people don't know about them until they visit our site first and ask a related question.
Other than that, we don't consider it General Reference even if the answer is a quote in a book or found on a specific episode of a TV show.
