User:White Arabian Filly/Horse world meets wiki world

The horse world meets the Wikipedia world every day. Even if you've never seen a horse in your life, if you've edited Wikipedia, you've probably seen some of these editing attempts.

The YouTube effect

I'm sure all editors with more than 15 edits will recognize this one, and not just in the horse articles!

Scene: A horse barn. An old horse trainer is saddling up a horse while an amateur student watches him.

STUDENT: That's not how you do that.

TRAINER: What?

STUDENT: That's not how you saddle a horse. I saw a YouTube video about that last night.

TRAINER: You know how reliable YouTube is?

STUDENT: The video had over 15,000 views.

TRAINER: Yeah, and who put it up there?

STUDENT: Um, I'm not sure...

TRAINER: There's a computer in the barn office. Let's go see.

They log onto YouTube. The student finds the video, and the trainer sees that it is by a couple of young children. It depicts them putting the saddle on from the wrong side, not tightening the girth enough, and letting the horse totally run away from them at one point.

STUDENT: See, they're doing it different from you.

TRAINER: They're doing it wrong.

STUDENT: Don't pick on them! They're just kids. Anyway, how do you know they're wrong?

TRAINER: I've been training horses for 40 years.

STUDENT: How do you know you haven't been doing it wrong for 40 years?

TRAINER: Because I learned from a couple of world-class trainers.

STUDENT: How do you know they weren't doing it wrong?

The trainer goes to the barn phone and calls another trainer he knows who has over 20 world championships to his credit. He puts the student on the line so the other trainer can tell them how to put a saddle on a horse. The student talks for a while and then hangs up.

TRAINER: Now do you think I know what I'm talking about?

STUDENT: No, I think everybody in the world is doing it wrong except those kids.

Of course, you know where this one is leading. The problem with articles about complex subjects like computing, medicine, and horses, is that many times people with no knowledge of the subject try to edit the article and inadvertently mess it up. Then they try to insist that their way is right, when they are using a very basic beginner-level book or website to crib information from.

The National Velvet effect

The National Velvet effect occurs when somebody gets famous for something that they accomplished through breaking, cheating, or bypassing the rules. Most of the time, everybody wants to justify what they did because it was romantic, entertaining, or just plain cute (Velvet Brown pretending to be a man and winning the Grand National on the Piebald!). The problem comes when people are trying to justify it on Wikipedia, rather than presenting the facts.

The blog effect

The moral of this one is, anybody can claim to be anything over the Internet, and we have no way to find out who they really are.

Mary Sue Smith is a sixteen-year old amateur rider from Pokeville, Alabama. She has a fat pony named Rocky, who she jumps in local shows, over fences that are never more than 2 feet high. Mary Sue has a blog she updates weekly with stories about her and Rocky's adventures. At some point, she discovers that most of her blog's readers are other teens who are mostly unfamiliar with the professional horse show scene. Gradually, Mary Sue's blog posts begin to take a fictional turn. First she and Rocky move up to jumping three feet, then four, and finally they are at Grand Prix height. By this time, Mary Sue is claiming that she and Rocky are shortlisted for the Olympic show jumping team. Although they haven't been covered anywhere else, most of the blog readers believe it. And like any good fans, they create Wikipedia articles for both Mary Sue and Rocky.