Category talk:Horse stubs

Untitled

Looking through various stubs, it seems to me that it's impossible to expand many of them simply because there's never going to be enough to say about them (or, more correctly, never enough which is verifiable to say about them). Wouldn't it make sense to merge these articles where possible, into more 'rounded' articles, e.g. Russian horse breeds, Asian Horse Breeds, Malaysian Horse Breeds, and so on ad infinitum? It would make for a much less 'bitty' encyclopaedia, all told, and redirects should solve any problems with people finding what they're looking for. (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 12:57, 14 February 2011 (UTC))

I don't think that wholesale consolidation is needed at this point. Many of the articles here can actually be expanded, we just haven't had anyone with the time and interest to do so. For example, a few weeks ago, I took Galiceno from this to its current state - with only a few hours of work and some basic sources. Also, it must be considered that less than half (111 out of 283) of the articles currently in this category are on actual breeds - the rest are a mixture of individual horses, organizations, horse ancestors/relatives, events, types, professions, health and anatomy articles and terms related to riding, tack, etc. There are a few people mixed in, although these really belong in Category:Equestrian biography stubs. I think at this point the better thing to do is to go through and tag the ones that have a place that they could easily be merged (see what I did with Search and rescue horse and Stud fee), and work on improving/expanding the rest. When the list gets whittled down a bit, then if we have a bunch from one country left (and yes, this is possible with countries like China or Indonesia) we can think about doing a merge. However, scientists are doing tons of studies on rare horse breeds, and so more and more information is becoming available on many breeds that were before almost unknown. Dana boomer (talk) 22:24, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm very new to this, so some of my suggestions may be way off-beat; but what about kinda temporarily merging some of the stubby things into 'horse skin conditions', 'n-country breeds' and so on, and then as and when more info (or a darned good editor - possibly one who can research any original sources written in Russian, Chinese, etc, and then translate them - comes along to expand on a section, and then take that section out and give it a page of its own? Would that work - or is it too much like work and unnecessary? Some of the stub notices seem to be really quite old, with nothing (or little) having been done to them in years. (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:25, 15 February 2011 (UTC))

I honestly think that the work/time that would be put into combining the articles and then splitting them back out would be better expended actually improving the articles past the stub point, adding references, etc. Like I said, for many of the breeds it won't take someone with specialized knowledge or foreign-language sources to improve them past the stub point, it will just take someone with a couple of hours of time to spend per article. I've been working on it slowly, as have other editors, and the number of articles in the category is dropping. I noticed elsewhere that you said you were interested in working on articles related to British horse organizations, of which there are several on the list. Every article that is improved past stub status - even if it's only to start or C class and not even to B or GA - is a help, and so I think that our time is better spent actually improving articles rather than combining and uncombining them. Dana boomer (talk) 14:55, 15 February 2011 (UTC)