Talk:Deli pony

Suggest merge
I suggest merging this page into Batak Pony, since they appear to be the same thing. There are 22 breeds in the List of Indonesian horse breeds I tried to make recently, and this is not among them. I'll probably go ahead and do that in a day or two unless there are objections. Pinging and  for comment. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 22:26, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Other suggestions
In the hope that a proposed project to do some work on Indonesian horse articles takes off, I'd like to make a couple of general suggestions/requests:
 * I hope to be able to improve the references. Would anyone mind if at the same time I changed the referencing system to list-defined, which groups the refs at the foot of the edit window instead of scattering them through the text? It makes it really a great deal easier to copy references from one article to another en bloc. I'll probably do that in a day or two unless anyone objects.
 * I tentatively suggest moving any of these that has "pony" in the title to the corresponding Foo horse (or Foo Horse, I don't mind). "Pony" is I believe an unnecessarily etic term, from right on the other side of the world. These are not really ponies, they are small horses that have undergone the usual island dwarfing. They are referred to as both horse and pony in the few available sources. I don't speak Indonesian, but the word "kuda" seems to be equally applied to all breeds, large or small. I don't plan to move them without some agreement from others. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 22:47, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

My humble opinion
I have long had the idle thought in the back of my head to merge all eight (or whatever number) articles - which will never be more than start-class at best - into one single article on Indonesian horse breeds. If you look at all the articles, it's clear they have rather similar history and similar ancestors. I think I pinged you that I now have the Bankoff/Swart book, and FWIW, it mentions that Batak but not the Deli. Sumbawa gets a whole chapter. (I can probably either photograph or scan pages and send - my scanning ability is kind of limited, but I've had luck with some folks on-wiki photographing pages at good resolution and emailing jpegs too...). A model for this was Welsh pony and cob, which originally had separate articles for the A,B, C, and D types. Was simple to unify the history and then do sections on each variant. I think something like this would work here, too. What do you think? Montanabw (talk) 23:48, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
 * It's certainly an idea, and not one that had occurred to me; I see the logic in the case of the Welsh Pony. I'm less convinced here; in general I think that, in a wiki where every episode of the Simpsons has its own page, a breed that has the recognition of its national government and coverage in a reasonable number of sources fully deserves a page of its own. But then I would think that, I'm the person who wrote more than forty articles on Italian goat breeds.
 * What struck me when I was working on these was how the origins are all the same... but the book may change that, and if the Indonesian government has an officially recognized list, then I guess if they want to split them out, who are we do say otherwise? ;-)   Montanabw (talk)  06:34, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Nothing to do with this page, but where that approach might really pay dividends is in the USA: what about Minor horse breeds of the United States, where some of those born-yestereday one-man or fifty-horse breeds that aren't reported to DAD-IS could have a short paragraph each? Some of your favourites might fit well there ...
 * For Indonesia, I'm inclined to stick with the status quo, because otherwise all that (10 minutes, maybe) work I did making the navbox will go to waste. There are a lot more than eight breeds, I think over 20 and still counting (Sawu is not in the list I made, but is often mentioned, for example). If you could face it, I'd really like to see the bibliography of the Bankoff book, by the way. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 01:12, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Heh, I wish (you missed the catfight over the Friesian cross (aka Friesian Sport Horse) versus the Friesian Sporthorse - two TOTALLY different things, don't you know? ) :-P But, do you have a link to the USA DAD-IS list?  (I've kind of thrown up my hands over the definition of a "breed" and was rather frustrated on one listing where the DAD-IS went along with the stupid thing that the "Egyptian Arabian" is somehow different from the "Arabian" when it isn't - other than the snotty clique that is trying to promote the same....)  I'll see what I can do with the pages, the notes and bibliography are extensive, the book is about 150-160 pages of ext, the rest notes and sources.   Montanabw (talk)  06:34, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
 * That is exactly the sort of page I mean. I've just this minute posted that link Talk:South German Coldblood|elsewhere]], but here it is again. On the Arabs, I've just been keeping my mouth firmly shut all this time (mainly because I really don't know much about it, though I used to ride in Arabia), but here's my take: what we call the Arab Horse in the West is not a breed but a hotchpotch of different breeds that in their countries of origin would never in a million years have been allowed to interbreed - see for example this, where no "Arab horse" is listed. There are other Western breeds that were created in the same way, such as the Purosangue Orientale. I don't know the history of the Egyptian Arab, but I do know that they are immediately recognisable to the expert eye (i.e., not mine), as are the Polish and Shagya and so on. I think the most important question there is "what do the Egyptians think?", and that we should beware of of giving more weight to an "outsider" view than to theirs. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 13:03, 1 November 2014 (UTC)