Talk:Cowboy polo

Citing personal communications?
My father was in New Smyrna Beach when palmetto polo was organized; he can name most of the saddle club members who first played it, and told me in passing about the early years, when championship winners were required to come to Florida to compete against the NSB locals. As far as I know, this sort of information isn't in print anywhere. So my question is, how does one cite personal communication on Wikipedia? And is there any interest in my delving for more details to add to this page? FBM (talk) 16:07, 5 April 2010 (UTC)


 * It's difficult to cite to personal correspondence in wiki, it's probably almost easier to write an article that gets published somewhere else, anywhere else, then cite to the article! (Even a local newspaper will do it) It is probably worth reading the wikipedia articles on citation and verifiability at WP:V and WP:CITE and also read up on our big bugaboo, no original research. I don't know what the interest level is, but I think that wikipedia isn't a place where popularity is an issue, merely "notability"-- and cowboy polo easily fits that standard, as far as I can see.   I am sympathetic to your dilemma because I was absolutely scraping the web to find what citation materials I did when I added footnotes to this article.  I think there may be a few times when personal correspondence can be used, but usually when it's archived at a library or a museum...the point is that we are an encyclopedia, and hence aren't supposed to be creating the material, just accumulating it...this is a problem across so many of the horse topics because so very much knowledge is still held and transmitted orally. Believe it or not, the same problem of finding good details is even biting us in the backside at the Spanish Riding School article, where they still have a great deal of material they obtain only through oral tradition. Sigh. Montanabw (talk) 17:55, 5 April 2010 (UTC)