Talk:English saddle

Distinct article -'Fitting the English saddle'[edit]

The subsection strikes me as worthy of an independent article as it is a distinct process. The article deals with the object to be fitted. WBardwin (talk) 02:49, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not really, to go into too much more detail will get us into how-to wikibooks realm. Also, this is the obvious place for it. Montanabw^(talk) 19:54, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Monoflaps[edit]

"A newer development"; not sure on this one (newer than what? lol!). I was riding on Turf and Travel's monoflap event saddles waaaaaaay back in the 1970's! How about "another development" instead? (I think I shall do that, having thought about it.) (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 23:15, 12 February 2011 (UTC))[reply]

I think the "monoflap" of the new kind has that sort of outside-visible knee roll thing going on... not sure. I can't keep up with the marketing. Yeah, I know what you mean about vintage 70s tack -- I still own some! LOL! Montanabw^(talk) 01:07, 13 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

IMO, the Turf and Travel saddles were some of the best ever made here in the UK, in the middle-price range. I have at least three of them now (all bought on eBay and lovingly restored to their former glory by Yours Truly). The Fulmer Dressage, the Club GP, and the Cavalier Event (monoflap). When I was a full-time instructor we just loved it when folks were rinding on a T&T - the saddle magically shunts the rider into the optimum position, leaving the instructor free to concentrate on getting the rider to improve the horse :o) (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 07:36, 13 February 2011 (UTC))[reply]

Had a thought: I can take some 'clean' pics of my T&T GP, and my T&T event (on white background), and we could split GP from Event. How does that sound? (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 07:43, 13 February 2011 (UTC))[reply]

GP vs Event saddle[edit]

Here in the UK, the GP (General purpose) saddle is designed for the riding club owner, happy hacker, riding school etc., where you're looking for a saddle which allows both lower-level jumping and lower-level dressage / flatwork, so is a bit of a compromise between the two. It's the saddle most commonly used by UK riders in most situations. The true eventing saddle is basically more of a jumping saddle, but with a less pronounced forward cut, giving more stability over cross-country fences (cross-country courses are usually ridden with a longer stirrup than show jumping courses as, on the whole XC courses are lower than those found in the SJ arena).

What shall we do about this? (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 23:34, 12 February 2011 (UTC))[reply]

In the USA, the distinction between a "general purpose" and an "eventing" saddle is exhaustively defined in terms of flap length, angle, etc., but in reality the REAL difference is "cheap" and "expensive" LOL! Real eventers clearly own and use three saddles, except at the lowest levels. My thinking is that we may need to figure out the degree to which we have a US/UK split or not, because your description of the GP sounds similar to that here, it's just that the "eventing" saddles here get marketed (ignorantly) as a saddle that could be used for all three disciplines. In the article the "eventing or all-purpose" saddle in the photo is the Collegiate Eventer, (now a division of Bates, I think) thus marketed as an "eventing" saddle, (FYI, I know this 'cause it's my saddle (grin)) if we want to clarify the caption and add your photo of the GP saddle also, with some explanation of the difference. What may help us with lingo is to discuss specific models sold internationally, like the Stubbens, Hermes, Bates, or Crosbys, and see if the same models are marketed with different names in the US and UK, etc... I suspect there actually isn't that much difference at the high end. Montanabw^(talk) 00:58, 13 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How about something along the lines of 'real' event saddles being primarily designed for the XC phase of eventing, and 'real' GP saddles being designed to be exactly that - general purpose saddle for the everyday rider? A true event saddle does place the rider's weight further back than a GP (it's about balance more than anything else. I know exactly what you mean about hiking the price by giving it a different name! (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 07:40, 13 February 2011 (UTC))[reply]

Well, it's all about sourcing. This is a place where there ARE books (I'm actually dragging one out, in fact -- that Henderson book I cited in the Kimble/ber/wick article) and we can footnote. We may have to look at some company web sites too. Probably best not to get into the "real" right answer, but what's sourceable (essay on this at Wikipedia: Veriafiability). Some of the brands you mentioned may not be marketed worldwide, but photos always good. On that note, what kind of a saddle would you consider the old classic Stubben Siegfried to be? I know the Stubben line pretty well firsthand, at least the old ones, used to own one and rode several. Montanabw^(talk) 06:54, 14 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

References / citations?[edit]

I have no idea where the most logical place would be to cite (for example) the Elwyn Hartley Edwards book - the information is dotted about all over the place! Where do you think? (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 08:30, 13 February 2011 (UTC))[reply]

Footnoting basics are explained at WP:CITE and its spinoff links. However, that article can be a little tough to read, so frankly, my advice is to find the highest quality articles and just copy the style and formatting syntax from them. For example, one of our featured articles (meaning it meets the highest quality standards on wikipedia) is Thoroughbred. Another one we are working on to nominate for FA is Appaloosa (we're basically ready to go, just that Ealdgyth is on vacation and we don't want to run the FA gauntlet without her!) But a few basics: When in doubt, footnote if you have a source that you can footnote to. Usually you will need a footnote for every paragraph, but there can be times you might footnote a single sentence. (Actually, to settle an edit war at horse, we have one section where I think we footnoted after every COMMA). At WPEQ, we tend to make two sections at the end of the article. The footnotes section, usually titled ==Notes== and then the bibliography, usually titled ==References== (yeah, I wanted them to be called "footnotes" and "bibliography", but Iost that one and am --mostly-- over it now) If something is used only a few times, we only do footnotes for it. But if it's used a ton, we put it into the References (bibliography) section with a full cite and all publisher info, etc. and then use an abbreviated footnote, like "Edwards, page 10". In short, the first time you refer to a source in a footnote, you put in the ref tags and the full citation (many different ways to do it, my rule is "put in enough so someone else can find it!" Others are more fussy than I am, but for a newcomer, get in as much as you can and then observe how we clean it up, over time, you'll figure it out). If you use the EXACT same citation again (i.e. if a book, the same page number and everything, then what you can do is name the reference the first time (you've seen ref tags that look like this <ref name=Schmo25>Schmo, page 25</ref> and then every time thereafter, you don't have to do the whole cite, you just go <Schmo25/> and away you go! Now, in a perfect world, you'll eventually get used to using things like the citation templates, and Dana or Ealdgyth (the goddesses of citation) will help show you how to improve the formatting, but in the meantime, something is better than nothing! The main thing is to try to do small edits so that if you DO mess something up, it won't be that much of a problem to fix it. (If you get all your work reverted, it may be someone is just being fussy, but if it's one of us at WPEQ, it's a sign that you really messed up and it was too much work to fix, just FYI) Montanabw^(talk) 03:07, 14 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Any editors here ever hear of "references"?[edit]

This article is an NOT what Wikipedia is about, what good is any of the information here if a reader can not go to the source and decide if it is valid information, dis-information, personal opinion etc. I personally would be embarrassed to participate in such a lengthy and in depth article such as this with almost no inline citations, I guess WIKIPEDIA GUIDELINES are just suggestions. Some of the more knowledgeable editors involved in this article should crack a book and fix this mess. Samuraiantiqueworld (talk) 18:53, 16 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the edit this page link at the top.
The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to).It's an older article with appropriate tagging that welcomes additional inline references. You are welcome to crack a book yourself and add references to verify existing material. However, the tone of your comment comes across in a very hostile manner and you would be well advised to review WP:AGF. Montanabw^(talk) 19:14, 16 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

zomg ... I meant to get onto this back in ummmmmmmmmm .... yup, over a year ago! (My baaaad; I forgot it!) Trouble is, we're all so darned busy doing heaps of other stuff as well, and we're all volunteers, and we all have Real Life Issues to deal with, and limited amounts of time and energy. Seriously, if you happen to have any decent saddlery books about you, please, please help us out here! Every extra pair of hands is valuable (and pairs of hands, and minds, who know the importance of this stuff, are like gold dust about here, so you'll be welcomed with open arms, offers of virtual beer, and so on.) I will attempt to remember to drag my saddlery books out of the storage unit and see what I can do in getting some of this properly done. Real Life permitting ... Pesky (talk) 19:36, 16 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Montanabw, Sorry, I have a lot of very badly referenced articles on my list already, on subjects that I have some knowledge of, I take a lot of time searching for references and validating or removing un-referenced material, let me know and I will show you how to find references online if you do not know how. On the other hand I personally would not continue adding to an article like this until I did follow Wikipedia guide lines on references but not all editors follow guidelines. As for the "tone of my comment", thats your personal opinion, I find it very disturbing to see Wikipedia abused in this way, people come here for VALID REFERENCED INFORMATION, and I see absolutely no attempt to do so in this article, if pointing out this obvious fact upsets you then I am sorry but it is the truthSamuraiantiqueworld (talk) 20:03, 16 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Samurai, there are some articles that are valid in content but unreferenced because they last got a serious run at them in about 2006 or 2007, when wikipedia's guidelines were not as focused on footnoting as they are today. Given that there are something like 2000 articles tagged for Wikiproject Equine and only about six editors who work regularly on them, we obviously are not going to get to things on your timetable. This article is tagged, people with sources are welcome to source what's in there. No one, myself included, has done much more than vandal reverts here in quite some time. If you have no interest in working on this article either, then please feel free to focus your energies wherever else you wish and please cease personalizing your comments here and elsewhere. Montanabw^(talk) 04:26, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 3 external links on English saddle. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{Sourcecheck}}).

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 14:44, 24 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Terminology[edit]

In English saddles we're not speaking of bars as we do in western saddles. The "bars" in an English saddles are called rails. If we refer to bars in an English saddle, we usually refer to the stirrup bars. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2003:73:4F44:A83F:2919:DC32:B00:C32C (talk) 17:30, 10 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]