User talk:Military Rider

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Hi, and thanks for your contributions to Dressage and Classical dressage. Those articles have needed some cleanup for a while. You may also want to take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject horse training. Someone put me in charge of it, but I have been focused on improving various articles and really have had no time to work on it. So any help there to either clean up the project or improve the articles listed is welcomed. It is a total and complete disaster, particularly because the "natural horsemanship" crowd sort of started it, but some of the people involved really have no clue. (The rest of us take a look at the mess and don't even know where to begin!) You will see links to many, many articles, and there is some serious work to be done.

That said, if you go in and do anything really major, at least on articles with active editors, it will help if you first make recommendations on the talk pages to see if there is any real dispute, and if you do dive in without discussion, it helps prevent spats if you can cite to specific sources with proper footnotes. I have no issue with your unsourced edits to the dressage articles, as I know your material is accurate, and the articles are massively unsourced to begin with, it will be a LOT of work to bring them up to proper verifiability...

But, for example, if you want to look over Horses in warfare, you will see how practically everything in there has been fought over and most of the piece is thoroughly footnoted. In fact, though the article has GA status, the military history folks still wouldn't move it up to A class because they felt there were areas that needed MORE footnotes! (Note: citation really, really matters to the military history wikipedians!)

Also, please remember that other people's edits were usually made in good faith. A sarcastic tone in edit summaries sometimes can start edit wars and cause unnecessary bad feelings (note to myself on this as well...hard not to get a bit snippy after reverting two dozen vandals when one prefers to do substantive work...).

With that, welcome again, and happy editing! If you have any general questions, feel free to drop me a line on my talk page. Montanabw^(talk) 23:05, 16 October 2007 (UTC)