Talk:Indian half-bred

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:American Paint horse which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 17:30, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed

This article has been revised as part of a large-scale clean-up project of multiple article copyright infringement. (See the investigation subpage.) Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: https://web.archive.org/web/20060513020852/http://www.equinekingdom.com/breeds/light_horses/indian_half_bred.htm. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.)

For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, and, if allowed under fair use, may copy sentences and phrases, provided they are included in quotation marks and referenced properly. The material may also be rewritten, providing it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Therefore, such paraphrased portions must provide their source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 03:23, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Current Student Project

This page is currently being edited by a group of students for a class assignment. Helen Purdy (talk) 00:54, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Anyone can edit wikipedia. Furthermore, some of us have been editing here for a long time and do not appreciate your tone. However I will post my comments on things you need to fix over at your Education Program talk:Oregon State University/Writing for the Web (Spring 2015) class talk page. Montanabw^(talk) 06:28, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come across as such. I'm currently working on the changes, thank you for your help. Helen Purdy (talk) 06:58, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

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.

Meanwhile, I've added the historic photo, for which thank you! Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 08:31, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

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)

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.

I had already intended to do as you have suggested and see what can be restored from the version I reverted. Regards, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 18:05, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Further to the above, Helen Purdy, I find to my surprise that Hartley Edwards had extensive first-hand experience of Indian horses including work in an army remount depot there, as his obituary recounts. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 20:38, 13 May 2015 (UTC)