User talk:Ealdgyth/Archive 52

This is an archive of past discussions with User:Ealdgyth. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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William Longchamp

The other reason - apart from giving the cause of Longchamp's removal - that I reverted your recent reversion of my edit is because it mentions St Paul's Churchyard as the setting of the downfall of Longchamp. That will be of interest to those interested in the history of London. Please respect the integrity of my edit. Too many editors seem ready to just remove other people's work and I hope you're not one of those. FClef (talk) 23:30, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

It's still trivia and you have not only not respected WP:BRD, you haven't tried to conform the references to the system already in use in the article nor have you even added grammatically correct information (Longchamps removal... is not correct grammar.) It's undue weight in an encyclopedic article. Kindly do not edit war to include something that is so tangental to the subject. Ealdgyth - Talk 23:41, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Quarter Horses

Hi, I created Steel Dust and thought you might want to look it over since it's on your list of articles to do. I only used two sources because I kept finding too much conflicting information, so it's a stub. I hope it's not too bad, because I tried to use the most legit sources. Thanks. White Arabian mare (Neigh) 14:30, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

The "Foundation Quarter Horse" webpage isn't reliable. The thing you're going to run into working on most horse articles is that very little that is available online is going to be considered a reliable source. Most of the information is in offline sources, often hard to find. This is especially true for horses before about 1980. And assessing what is reliable is difficult - much of what gets published is guesswork or based on other sources that were guesswork. And there is a lot of just plain wrong information published also. You're probably better off working on more modern horses because they will be easier to work with, easier to find sources for, and will have much more information available. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:40, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

I was intentionally trying to avoid modern horses because Montanabw told me it was best not to write articles on still-living horses unless they were winning Grade 1 stakes races or something. Also, I have noticed the crappy sources thing as well; I've seen too many books that were just somebody rehashing somebody else's work rather than doing their own research, much less websites (I don't know how some of the authors don't get sued for plagiarism). And all the books that feature the 3 or 4 most famous racehorses and totally ignore hundreds of other horses who got famous for other things. Ugh. White Arabian mare (Neigh) 15:33, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

My take is that we start with what we have and improve as we go; the modern, still-living horses are sometimes equally tough because there's so much advertising out there; in some respects, the "sweet spot" are the horses from the 70s and 80s where there is good info but the horses are deceased. JMO. I do think the Western Horseman Quarter Horse Legends books are OK for the basics, aren't they? What WAM is doing with the stubs is just putting in the basics, seems a good thing to do... so long as we don't try to go for GA or FA with the sources available... Montanabw^(talk) 02:08, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

The reason unreliable sources are not used is that they are unreliable. If you build your article on unreliable sources, it's like building a house on a foundation of sand. Take the example of the Steel Dust article. It is not certain that his foaling date was 1843 nor that he was foaled in Kentucky - it may have been Illinois. I've never seen a story that he was used as a plow horse. (Is this confusion with Traveler?). It doesn't appear that Steel Dust was retired from racing until 1855 - not "shortly after his race with Monmouth". But there is not anything that is "solid" about Steel Dust's story - partly because there are so many different Steel Dust's. (I counted over 12 once). But the article gives everything as solid reliable facts, rather than guesswork. THAT is why it's not a good idea to work from unreliable sources. A reliable source would give all the "ifs, ands. or buts"... Ealdgyth - Talk 13:24, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

I changed it to say, "or possibly Illinois" and took out the stuff about when he retired and the plow horse stuff. Personally, I don't care if I never do another Quarter/Paint/Appaloosa article and I'm getting tired of trying to find reliable sources: everything is either written by somebody who dealt personally with the horse, and so is biased, or it comes off a website that is supposedly reliable but that appears to be written primarily by 16-year old girls. I prefer the breed association and pro websites to most of the mainstream equestrian sites because most of them (with the exception of Equus) appear to have a bigger POV-pushing agenda than PETA. Everything is natural horsemanship-bitless bridle-treeless saddle-barefoot trimming-trail riding, and there is almost no coverage of show or racehorses (or horses that do anything except sit out in a pasture all their lives) without snarky horse abuse comments being thrown in. It doesn't help, either, that most of the books published now are written by amateurs instead of trainers. I thought the article was needed, which was why I created it. White Arabian mare (Neigh) 00:20, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

The main issue you're probably having is that it's websites. Much of what's written on the web about QHs/Paints/Apps isn't really ... based on any sort of source that can be traced. If the website doesn't tell you where they got the information, who knows where they got it and if it's reliable? Steel Dust (and Shiloh, and Copperbottom, etc) will suffer not just from that problem, but also the problem of the lack of contemporary sourcing for them - they were on the frontiers and they predate the formation of the American Stud Book, much less the AQHA. Lots of tall tales got spun about them, but there are very few "facts" available. I know, I've worked on research for them for almost 20 years outside of Wikipedia. The various foundation QH registries are more concerned with minimizing the TB influence on the QH, the Paint people want to minimize the QH influence on their breed, I've never understood the App sub-culture (partly because I'm not real fond of Apps and they aren't that fond of me)... and that leaves aside the whole TB researcher issue (and their interactions with QH researchers) and then we get to the Arabian people who refuse to admit they might have some non-Arabian bloodlines in the breed ... and the Morgans wanting to emphasize that THEY are the real "first horse breed of the US" and then you get the gaited horses... ugh. The Morgan folks try to claim Steel Dust as a Morgan, the TB folks want to forget that American TBs can't always trace all their bloodlines to English TBs, etc etc. To quote Star Wars - horse bloodline research is often times a "wretched hive of villainry". Welcome to the club, says the cynical oldtimer. Ealdgyth - Talk 00:30, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

You know, what strikes me in all this is how critical wikipedia is becoming; if it isn't on the internet, it doesn't exist, these days. Ealdgyth, I don't know how much you've published IRL (as opposed to doing private research) but you know you can ping me any time with good source material, and given that you've got the books, WP still is OK with dead tree source materials. As for these old horses, a small stub of what little is known is probably worth having, if for no other reason than to have a base. I always believe in "teaching the controversy" whether it be genetic diseases (my thing, as Ealdgyth knows) or coat colors (which I got into once I got the genetics interest piqued) or history of the various breeds. I don't know if either of you (pinging White Arabian mare ) know about my horse breeds snark page, but feel free to add content and comment at User:Montanabw/List of horse breeds promoters claim "truly primitive bred pure since Adam and Eve"! Montanabw^(talk) 02:12, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

WikiCup 2015: The results

WikiCup 2015 is now in the books! Congrats to our finalists and winners, and to everyone who took part in this year's competition.

This year's results were an exact replica of last year's competition. For the second year in a row, the 2015 WikiCup champion is Godot13 (submissions) (FP bonus points). All of his points were earned for an impressive 253 featured pictures and their associated bonus points (5060 and 1695, respectively). His entries constituted scans of currency from all over the world and scans of medallions awarded to participants of the U.S. Space program. Cwmhiraeth (submissions) came in second place; she earned by far the most bonus points (4082), for 4 featured articles, 15 good articles, and 147 DYKs, mostly about in her field of expertise, natural science. Cas Liber (submissions), a finalist every year since 2010, came in third, with 2379 points.

Our newcomer award, presented to the best-performing new competitor in the WikiCup, goes to Rationalobserver (submissions). Everyone should be very proud of the work they accomplished. We will announce our other award winners soon.

A full list of our award winners are:

Godot13 (submissions) (FP bonus points) wins the prize for first place and the FP prize for 330 featured pictures in the final round.
Cwmhiraeth (submissions) wins the prize for second place and the DYK prize for 160 did you knows in the final round (310 in all rounds).
Cas Liber (submissions) wins the prize for third place and the FA prize for 26 featured articles in all rounds.
West Virginian (submissions) wins the prize for fourth place
Calvin999 (submissions) wins a final 8 prize.
Rationalobserver (submissions) wins a final 8 prize.
Harrias (submissions) wins a final 8 prize and the FL prize for 11 featured lists.
Rodw (submissions) wins the most prizes: a final 8 prize, the GA prize for 41 good articles, and the topic prize for a 13-article good topic and an 8-article featured topic, both in round 3.
ThaddeusB (submissions) wins the news prize for the most news articles in round 3.

We warmly invite all of you to sign up for next year's competition. Discussions and polls concerning potential rules changes are also open, and all are welcome to participate. The WikiCup judges will be back in touch over the coming months, and we hope to see you all in the 2016 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.

Figureskatingfan (talk · contribs · logs), Miyagawa (talk · contribs · logs) and Sturmvogel 66 (talk · contribs · logs) 18:39, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

WikiCup Award

Hey

		The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
		Getting back into the swing of wiki-things again after a good spell of attending to the real world (and before that, mostly keeping busy with ArbCom stuff...) and nowadays it's nice (and feels rare) to see an old name, still working away making fascinating articles I love reading. Hope things are going well! Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs^(talk) 17:44, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, David. Good to see you back. I'm not around quite as much as I'd like - we're getting ready to move - but hopefully again in the future I'll be editing more. Ealdgyth - Talk 19:55, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Article space

I took your prompt and made some article space edits, actually adding some content too. Thanks for the pointer. Drmies (talk) 05:29, 16 November 2015 (UTC)