User talk:Pinto629

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Thanks for your comments. But please understand that the various wikipedia editors are not total idiots. I don't mean to be too harsh, I monitor over 250 horse-related articles on my watchlist, and I get a bit snappish at times. Nonetheless, your edits were poorly written and needed a lot of work to clean up. It was easier to revert the whole thing and just re-incorporate the better points.

But you also didn't even read the whole article before you began editing, as you repeated material already covered elsewhere, particularly the material on Paints, you seemed oblivious to the fact that the differences were in fact explained, if briefly, and you clearly didn't even use the wikilinks to discover that there was an entire other article on the topic. (We've also had a Paint versus Pinto editing discussion a long time ago, long resolved)

Repeating information and failure to organiza material is not an uncommon error of people new to Wikpedia, but you are better off to propose ideas on the article's talk page when you dive in and make major changes before you are familiar with the "culture" of an article. (For example if the article is a stub that has been abandoned for months, one can be much bolder than with an article being actively worked on by others. On the other hand, change one word in a military history article without discussion at your peril! =:-O )

The article was originally designed to be about the color. And it is still about the color. But to rename it will imply that only PtHA animals are "real" pintos, and that would be misleading. Many of the other "color" articles use the term horse, to not confuse them with other things Bay (horse), Sabino horse, Palomino, and the exception Chestnut (coat). Roan (color) is so titled in part because other animals besides horese are described.

The Pinto Horse Association is an organization in the USA designed to promote horses of that color, and as such, if you want to do an article about the registry (there is one about the AQHA, for example), that would be appropriate and it could be linked to from the Pinto horse article. However, if you pick up just about any book on horses, "pinto" will be a color, not a breed, even though PtHA clearly is trying to make pintos into a breed by incorporating things like a breeding stock registry.

The "when is a color breed a 'real' breed" issue is a fight I don't think wikipedia needs, (been there, done that), but essentially I do not believe that it is appropriate for an article about the color to be a promotion for a single organization, especially when the color is considered a "breed" only in the United States (and maybe Canada). Everywhere else it is considered simply a color that may be in many different breeds of horses, or at most, a "color breed."

A quick Google search reveals the following national Pinto registries: Pinto Horse Association of America, National Pinto Horse Registry, Canadian Pinto Horse Association, plus in Australia, there are several branches of the The Pinto Horse & Pony Association Inc. So while PtHA is notable as apparently the largest and most professional organization, the existence of NPHR in particular suggests at the very least that there are "political" differences of opinion out there...and Wikipedia needs a neutral point of view.

The Pinto registry may only recognize Overo and Tobiano, but genetically, there are other things going on, Sabino in particular is a distinct gene-complex. The Paint Registry is far more up to date on genetic understanding, in that regard. Their web site explains many more patterns. People in the UK also use completely different terminology, hence the references to Piebald and Skewbald horses. We need to remember that Wikipedia is an international project. Hope this helps. The article is never "finished" in wikipedia, and I made a couple edits that may clarify matters a bit more. Montanabw 22:26, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hope this is constructive...

OK, so let's not start a flame war. There is room for the article to discuss both the color breed and the color, and room to clarify language. I'm all for accuracy and I appreciate that you are establishing your credentials. However, I am vehemently opposed to propaganda, and even in the articles I care the most about, I vigorously work to keep them encyclopedic in tone and as NPOV as possible. You will discover that I am more than willing to leave alone work that is well done.

I think the solution is twofold. First, I sincerely DO encourage you to write an article here about the Pinto Horse Association. The process itself is a great way to get going on wikipedia norms and "culture." (For one thing, there is always some admin who is more anal-retentive than I am out trolling the new articles who will slap some kind of critical tag on your efforts, sigh...) There are articles about the AQHA, Arabian Horse Association and the Appaloosa Horse Club. They may offer some ideas for how to (or how not to) do it. Writing your own article is a chance to clarify some of the points you are concerned about. You can also create language that links to it from the Pinto article, as is already done with the Paint article.

Second, maybe take your concerns about the article--as it is written today (you will note I did some more editing) to the talk page of the Pinto horse article and see if anyone else wants to weigh in on the topic. I will look over your comments on my talk page in more detail, and see if I can find a place to address some of them.

However, there is a bit of a Catch-22 here:

What we have is an article that was started with a European slant and it has been edited into something that is more US-centered, which in itself could become a topic for yet another type of edit war. I consider myself neutral on the topic of color breeds, and frankly, what I probably spend too much of my time doing is reverting people who put up advertising on the breed pages (tracking vandals is why I have 280 pages on my list) I really don't give a hoot about, say, Friesians, but I do care about good writing and wikipedia keeping commercial stuff out. (I probably spent two hours on the Friesian article once, just editing out excessive unencyclopedic adjectives like "glowing, beautiful black coat" and simply saying "black coat." sigh...)

Anyway, let's declare a truce and see what can be done to make the article work. You may want to look at American Paint Horse and propose comments there as well. (There is also no separate article on APHA, by the way, which I think is needed). Montanabw 15:52, 19 April 2007 (UTC)