Template talk:Horse topics

OK, new header for organizational purposes

Summing up various points with indents and signing mine individually so as to facilitate discussion on various points and make threading easier. Overall, Scott Alter has many good ideas here, and provide good grounds for discussion. Montanabw(talk) 06:18, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • First off, please do not mistake or distort what I am doing. I most certainly did NOT move template Equidae to Equine -- Una did that. I originallly opposed the change and at the time said that if the template was changed, the person changing it should also take responsibility for fixing all the pages it linked to. So Una also did that change, though not precisely in the manner I anticipated! She "dumped" the job on herself. Surely there was an easier way to have done this. Montanabw(talk) 06:18, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Second, I LIKE Ealdgyth's suggestion to put a link to List of horse breeds into the infobox. That is the simplest and most elegant suggestion to that particular problem that I can imagine. (Ealdgyth, IMHO you know how to do it right, go for it, it's outside this discussion anyway) Montanabw(talk) 06:18, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Third, I personally and officially have no involvement with the new Equidae, and Equus templates. Taxonomists, work away and the discussions can go there. I just don't see why we need three of them, personally. But I also DGAF. Montanabw(talk) 06:18, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fourth, Scott Alter did a great job with the coat colors template and yes, if we can just leave that one alone, it is doing its job and working very well. Too bad we can't do the same on all the rest. The tack templates are a no-win situation at present due to the consensus problem between the only two editors who appear to care. Montanabw(talk) 06:18, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fifth, Horse breeds/List of horse breeds. Let's leave the actual list as is for now. Ealdgyth's suggestion solves my concerns about having people easily find other breed articles. That's all I really need. There was a deliberate merge of Horse breed into the list, as it was a stub at the time that spun off into the horse breeding article. The combo of text and list is inspired by List of dog breeds. List of horse breeds is a list, intended as a list, not an article. And please do trust me, there is NOT going to be a lasting consensus on the categorization of living horse breeds issue. It's worse than dog breed stuff. Horse people have no standardized categories like the AKC does, partly because horses themselves are rather versatile. One need only look at past history from a couple years back on various articles such as an old debate on what was and was not a pony, as well as the routine edits to nearly every horse breed article claiming that a given breed can do almost anything, including walking on water and leaping tall buildings with a single bound. LOL! I BEG people not to go near this one for now. Please, please, please! Montanabw(talk) 06:18, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sixth, to the one issue out of the immediate template discussion that I would like to participate on, the concept of a WPEQ navbox. The Template:Equine/sandbox Una has is not a tremendous change from template Equine. There is room for good faith negotiation and collaboration on this one. I would like to see some elements of both old and new put into the final version. But I would prefer not to have red links. (We have dozens of horse health/disease articles, that's a navbox in and of itself, note the categories) And yes, I want to keep the doggone picture! (LOL) Montanabw(talk) 06:18, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

ONWARD! Montanabw(talk) 06:18, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Heh -- just a note from a low level of the dog project, since someone here has been leaving notes -- dogs are pretty chaotic too; in the English-speaking world there are many breed clubs with their own categorisations; look at the international breed club organization, the Fédération Cynologique Internationale, for organising more precisely by type and function than the American Kennel Club. There are a vast number of dog breeds due to the enormous plasticity of the dog genome and the public's hunger for novelty; not a horse situation, I don't think.
Dog type and the List of dog types (Category:Dog types) might be interesting for you. I'm sure everyone has an opinion, so I'll be hiding behind that rock over there now.--Hafwyn (talk) 18:04, 15 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Image

Many navboxes have images, there must be some way to incorporate them that plays well with multiple devices. RexxS, any ideas on this? Montanabw(talk) 10:30, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I removed it for two reasons: first, because it kept popping up everywhere, in any article that didn't have any other image in it, in mobile view and in hovercards; and second, because it served no useful purpose. However, the best solution to the first and more serious problem would be to simply confine the use of the template to the pages it is supposed to link, as is our invariable (?) practice throughout the project. The current deployment on almost 500 pages is neither appropriate nor useful. I've suggested before, though I can't recall where or when, that Portal:Horses should be used instead. As an experiment, I've replaced the template with a portal bar at Noma pony and at Senner. Does the hovercard problem still occur? (the first image on the portal page is the one I removed from here). Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 12:53, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) @Montanabw: As far as I know, there's no problem with displaying images on any common device. However, navboxes do not display on mobile view at all; compare the bottom of:
Although the navbox documentation says "This template does not display in the mobile view of Wikipedia; it is desktop only. Read the documentation for an explanation.", there is no explanation in the documentation, so your guess is as good as mine why not. --RexxS (talk) 12:57, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • The image is something I am not going to fight over. I see the MOS gods are now leaning toward removing images (where they once favored them, oh well). Personally, I have never had the hovercard problem described here, so it feels like a solution in search of a problem to me. The horses portal doesn't link to the list of horse breeds, so as far as a portal bar, I have no position either way. If it's an allowable MOS to add for other reasons, fine, (want to add it to the other 3000 articles tagged for WPEQ? Be my guest) But that isn't solving the issue now being raised. But the 500 page navbox transclusion is in fact highly appropriate and useful; navboxes serve a purpose distinct from both lists and categories, which is to aid readers in finding similar articles of interest. There must be a way to link to all other horse breed articles, and thus we use the equine template to link to the List of horse breeds, which is a simple and efficient way to do so, as we have over 400 breeds and types the alternative is a 400-item navbox because the "breed by nation" templates are, at best, insufficient, do not cover all breeds, and if we had one for every nation, well that's a bloated navbox too. The only other solution is to put List of horse breeds in the see also of 400+ articles, which is also ridiculous. People don't just want to find breeds from one nation, they want to learn about all the breeds, so to speak. These are a service to our readers. Also, linking list of horse breeds in the lead is not as good as linking to horse breed, which explains what a "breed" is... Montanabw(talk) 22:18, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
What you say is my understanding too, RexxS – navboxes don't display in mobile view. But I'm pretty sure that I'm not making up what I said – that the image was appearing in the Wikipedia app on my phone. I'd like to test that again to be sure, but I haven't come across a page that has (a) no image and (b) a navbox with an image in it – can you suggest one? That fat palomino mare was most certainly popping up all the time in hovercards, on any horse page that had no other image.
What I have been able to test (subjectively, on the devices that I use) is that the images in the portal do not get transcluded either on hovercards or in the Wikipedia app.
Montanabw, this template doesn't link any breed articles because there aren't any breeds listed in it. It links various general horse topics, and it's wholly appropriate for it to be on those pages. I'm not going to quote a guideline here because we both know who wrote it, but we also both know that there is pressure to remove navboxes from articles that don't appear in them. I'm suggesting the portal – which does, by the way, have a link to the list of horse breeds, in the Topics box – as a neat way of getting round that. As for deploying it on 3000 pages if there's consensus to do so, that's just the kind of totally straightforward task a bot could do with its hands tied behind its back. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 18:04, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The "bidirectional" issue, well, I don't feel that highly contentious concept is a good reason to remove the list from the navbox, (in fact, I hesitate to give in to such a "consensus" as it is a rather artificial one). Until or unless we actually have a true better option for allowing a person who finds one breed article to easily link to ALL the other breed articles (via the list, which is easier to navigate than the category), I most strongly oppose removing the template from the horse breeds articles. The "breeds by nation" templates are not an answer (though a link in each to the list of horse breeds might be a decent idea) As they only good for nations with only a few native breeds -- we've long discussed the problems with, to give two examples on opposite ends of the spectrum, the hundreds of breeds that could be part of a USA template or, in contrast, the five different nations that can legitimately claim the Lipizzaner.
My personal opinion is that the portal is unmaintained and though pretty and well set up for random info, as a navigation aid, it is pretty much useless... it is merely a "front page" to equine topics, but it contains no real useful set of "links to popular articles" or to the breeds list. My position is that if someone wants to enable a bot to transclude a link to the portal on every page tagged by WPEQ, I don't object, and I suppose that actually would probably be a nice thing to do, but it doesn't solve the navbox problem unless we also redo the portal. (Redoing the portal is a possibility, but I have no idea where to start... I maintained the rotating articles for a while after Dana boomer left, but the real work needs to be on the main page itself). So, we have two different issues here. Montanabw(talk) 22:42, 16 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Grorp. I see you removed redlinks from the infobox based on WP:NORED which I think is not relevant as this policy is for * Articles that are unlikely to be created and retained on Wikipedia, including articles that do not comply with Wikipedia's naming conventions. an example is the redlink for Horses in television and film an appropriate page that are needed and there are many smaller articles than can help a capable on writing about the topic, see for example Category:Horses in film and television. Leaving the redlinks encourages editors to try and make them, and does not give the perception that the horse project is complete when it’s missing highly important articles. Hope you reconsider your edit FuzzyMagma (talk) 07:27, 10 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@FuzzyMagma: Per § Avoiding creation of certain types of red links, Red links may be used in navboxes which also contain links to existing articles, but they cannot be excessive. Editors who add excessive red links to navboxes are expected to actively work on building those articles, or the links may be removed from the template.
You added 14 redlinks to this template in one day; I consider that excessive. I checked to see if you were working on such articles. You don't have any drafts in progress in your userspace, and you've only worked on one horse article in draftspace (Draft:List of horses by country).
I have no objection to you writing these articles and then adding them to this template. But adding redlinks to the template in order to "encourage others to write articles" is a misuse of redlinks in navbars. Navbars are for readers of Wikipedia, not wiki editors. If you want to encourage other editors to write these articles, then you should use the WikiProject space, such as Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Equine.
Though there are many examples of navbars which use redlinks, these are finite lists which usually show all topics belonging to a collection, such as Template:Horse breeds of France which has just two redlinks, and Template:Horse breeds of Africa which has many redlinks. By showing redlinks in finite lists, it shows the reader all the subtopics.
However, open-ended topic navbars almost never have any redlinks because the possibilities are endless. Example: Template:Employment or Template:Cycling.
Grorp (talk) 00:21, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Grorp make sense. Let me build some of these articles and then I might have a leg to stand on to put some redlinks. Thanks FuzzyMagma (talk) 06:58, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Unchecked expansion

How did we get from this nice compact "Evolution and history" in this version [1] to the rambling/sprawling version we have today [2]? This reorganization and expansion happened in just the last few months, with no discussion.

There are a lot of templates that could have been co-opted to put this into, but this template seemed to be a nice overview of EQUUS. It has become a "throw everything about horses in here", which is not what it seems to have been created for. For example, the "mythology section"... I don't think this belongs in here. And someone is creating CONTEMPORARY articles about the horse industry in each country and it has been shoehorned into the "evolution and history" section, where it doesn't belong.

Either create a new subsection for these contemporary "by country" articles, or start a new template specifically for that. ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 02:20, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"someone is creating CONTEMPORARY articles about the horse industry" .. that is not true. These articles about horse histories, the section is called "Evolution and history" not just evolution. Even in what you call "compact" version, it included Horses in the United States but the moment you start adding Togo and Sudan it suddenly becomes CONTEMPORARY! FuzzyMagma (talk) 11:58, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@FuzzyMagma: The USA article is a history article, and yes about the evolution of the horse on the North American continent. And it wasn't just Sudan and Toga that were added, but also Botswana, Cameroon, Cuba, Ethiopia, Greece, Iran, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Slovenia. And those are not history/evolution articles for Equus (genus), but mainly coverage of the contemporary horse industry in those countries. So next time you reactively respond to someone's good faith thread which is intended to help improve the encyclopedia, at least look at the links before you start typing your outrage. ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 11:31, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The Sudan article is history article too. I am not sure what are you taking about. Please leave good faith alone especially after yoir first message FuzzyMagma (talk) 16:54, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have reorganized the template. The countries were moved to their own section "By region" near the bottom. The recent additions of culture-ish things were moved to their own section at the bottom. I added a few more countries I found. I removed some of the minor 'list' articles. The evolution & history section was restored to match its title. ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 11:31, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I see you put US history article. I am not sure if this match your complaint but I have no issues with what you did. Cheers FuzzyMagma (talk) 16:58, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
allikas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Equine