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I've taken the rather drastic step of reverting all the recent edits here; I'll try to explain why. I recently completely rewrote this page following removal of a long-standing copyright violation. To do so, I searched for reliable sources that discuss this horse type. I didn't have much luck. In the end, the content I wrote was all based on Hartley Edwards, a breed encyclopaedia, and thus a source to be used with the utmost caution; however, Hartley Edwards – unlike, I suspect, the authors of most such works – did at least visit India and correspond with Indian horse experts (p. 396 of his book).
Four of the sources that were added by the student editors (eggvan.com, mypets.net.au, equinekingdom.com, royalridingholidays.com) are not remotely, by any stretch of the imagination, reliable by our standards; the fifth, Swinney, is just another breed encyclopaedia (on which please see my comment above). If this article is to be expanded (and it could certainly do with it!), the first step is to identify reliable sources about this horse. University students have access to journals and databases that the rest of us would give our eye-teeth for; it should be possible to find some dependable information.
On this specific topic, the databases I have access to through the university have been unfortunately lacking compared to the current information available online which was incorporated into our changes. However, I understand your insistence on keeping the live page exactly within all of Wikipedia's guidelines. However, is no information better than a complete page with the possibly of one or two small inaccuracies? But nonetheless, I moved our changes into my Sandbox since the project is due today. I would just ask you to consider adding some of the information in our lead to the live page, specifically the linking to similar/mistaken pages. Besides that, if your current source is also an encyclopedia like our book source I would like you to look it over and see if it can be held to a similar standard. Good luck with the page Helen Purdy (talk) 16:33, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, Helen Purdy, you have a very valid (and essentially unanswerable) point there. I habitually mistrust all breed encyclopaedias, mainly because they all seem to rehash what all the others have said before them. That is why I wrote above "... Hartley Edwards, a breed encyclopaedia, and thus a source to be used with the utmost caution; however, Hartley Edwards – unlike, I suspect, the authors of most such works – did at least visit India and correspond with Indian horse experts (p. 396 of his book)". Hartley Edwards was a moderately, not very, well-known figure. Please be clear that I would not stand in the way of any changes to the article based on more reliable references. My first question for Ms Swinney would be "Why did you include a cross-breed in a book on horse breeds?" (a cross-breed, obviously, is by definition not a breed).
To answer your question above: yes, no information is always better than questionable or inaccurate information, in Wikipedia as in life. We try here to include only what is verifiable in reliable sources (of course, we don't always succeed). Unverified information may be removed at any time, even if it is true and accurate. That is what distinguishes us from, say, equinekingdom.com: when you read a Wikipedia article, you can check the sources for what you are reading, and make your own evaluation of the accuracy of our text. This would be a useful learning outcome for your students to take away from this experience, which I fear may otherwise have been disappointing for them.
