Talk:Ranch sorting

I just created an article about Ranch Sorting
I attended my first Ranch Sorting show on October 11, 2008 and thoroughly enjoyed the sport. I have never really enjoyed live attendance at a full scale rodeo because the events take place too far away, but Ranch Sorting is a very fast paced event that takes place comfortably indoors, and the audience is right up next to the action so I found myself becoming engrossed in the competition.

I took hundreds of photos of the events I saw on October 11 and October 12. The sport is very amenable to sports photography. Today I did some research on the sport, found that there was no existing article on Wikipedia, and created this article. I have added three of my own photos to illustrate different aspects of the sport.

The article is pretty well cited. I believe that every statement in the article has a citation.

I'll be watching google for news on Ranch Sorting and adding to the article as events unfold about the sport.

Best Regards, Reservoirhill (talk) 19:23, 13 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Welcome and thanks for starting the article. Just don't confuse it with team penning.  Maybe clarify the difference between the two.   Montanabw (talk) 23:48, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't agree with removing the citations. It's a Best Practice to put a citation at the end of each sentence
Putting a citation at the end of each sentence is a best practice.

First it does no harm.

But it has numerous advantages.


 * It lets editors know that each sentence has a citation and not just the last sentence in the paragraph.


 * Later editors are going to move things around. When they move a sentence to another paragraph, the citation goes with it.


 * When later editors edit a sentence, sometimes they add new information. If the new information is not supported by the existing citation, it lets editors know that an additional citation needs to be added to support the new information.

One of the purposes of Wikipedia is to ensure that every article is supported by citations. We are not looking for "truth" but verifiability. To my way of thinking, if you edit an article on Wikipedia and add information but don't add a citation for your information, you might as well not have added the information at all. In fact, you have damaged the article by adding unverified information, not improved it. You have just made it harder for someone else later on to correct your mistake. From an engineering point of view, you have increased the entropy in the article.

Take a look at an article like Rickie Lee Jones. There is not a single citation in the entire article. People just go in add stuff because they feel like it. How does a reader know what is true or false? Is the entire article just hearsay? Once an article falls into this state of disrepair, the only way to fix it is to start over from scratch and only put in facts, one at a time, that have citations.

Now look at an article like Mae Jemison. Almost every sentence in the article is supported by a citation. There has been some rigor applied to putting the article together. There is no doubt that any "fact" in the article is supported by a source. Which of the two articles would you put more confidence in?

You say that "Don't need to cite every sentence if all from the same source unless challenged." Someone who is familiar with the material may not be around when it is challenged. Once they start adding material to a sentence that has a citation, then you will never know what it cited and what isn't.

A "best practice" is a good habit you get into like always using your turn signal before you make a turn while you are driving or commenting your code when you are writing a program. You don't have to use the best practice and you can still drive your car and your program may run just fine. But later on when someone else tries to maintain your code and make some changes to it, it may be impossible to figure out what is going on, if the code isn't properly documented.

Best Regards,

Reservoirhill (talk) 23:17, 14 October 2008 (UTC)


 * You have some reasonable points.  It isn't a real big deal if you want to restore them, but I have been a major contributor to 6 or 7 Good Articles and one Featured article and in the process of those reviews, we have done fine with one footnote at the end of several sentences all from the same source.  This is probably the first time I have ever wondered if an article has TOO MANY sources!  LOL!!  Tell you what I'll do, I am going to ask the footnoting Guru of WIkiproject Equine to take a look at this and weigh in.  We'll see what she says.   Montanabw (talk) 23:32, 16 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Generally speaking, you don't need to sequentially footnote sentences, i.e. if all of the information in a series of sentences comes from the same source (or set of pages in a source), you don't need to put the same footnote on each sentence. It is understood that a long line of sentences are "covered" by the last footnote. Ealdgyth - Talk 21:46, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Follow up
Per Sandy Georgia's edits and comments, I left the cites untouched but restored some of the wordsmithing edits I made. This is generally a very solid start-class article, and nothing in the core content was changed. Basically, 1) I took out long explanations in the captions, as most were (and all should) be explained in the text. Captions need to just point to where the details can be found in the text. 2) I toned down some language that was too informal or too "peacock words" in tone for an encyclopedia so it's a bit more formal. 3) I also added a couple of "see also" articles that may be of interest to readers that are not linked in the article itself.  My changes may not be perfect, either, (grin) but if you want to change anything, it would be a kindness not to do a wholesale revert (see WP:OWN for guidelines) but rather to edit the new version to add or change things. Or just discuss issues about tone here.  Thanks.   Montanabw (talk) 19:11, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Follow up Follow up
Thanks for your comments. I understand that Ranch Sorting is not a controversial subject nor is it a particularly complicated subject and that providing citations for every sentence is overkill for this article. However many of the articles that I have worked on have thirty or forty citations and I have found the procedure I use to be an invaluable aid to to keeping the citations straight as the articles evolve.

I specifically started using the process when I rewrote an article on US Senator Paul Coverdell that did not contain a single citation and I had to go in sentence by sentence and verify the facts in the article one by one, and then completely reorganize the article based on the new information added. The point I am making is that there are processes from engineering and programming that may be applicable to writing articles for wikipedia, and that it is good practice to follow the processes even when they aren't really required.

Citation Entropy
There are two specific problems I see time and again on wikipedia that the process addresses: A paragraph may be properly cited, then someone comes in and adds new material to the paragraph that is not supported by the citation or moves a sentence from a paragraph that has a citation to another part of the article. In the first case, someone should add a notation to the added material until a citation can be provided. In the second case, someone should replicate the citation and move it along with the sentence. Usually neither takes place and both these cases degrade the quality of the information in a wikipedia article.

Programming Inheritance
"Citation Entropy" is not an issue in written research. When an author writes an article for a book, it is acceptable to provide a single citation for a paragraph or an entire section since the written work is immutable. However, Wikipedia differs from the written work because the collections of facts are not immutable and that is why wikipedia needs a process that provides what programmers call Inheritance (computer science) to the programming primitives - in this case the "facts" in a wikipedia article.

Best Regards, Reservoirhill (talk) 15:10, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

follow up to follow up to follow up (grin)
I don't disagree with your points about the above two issues - I've seen it in action last year when I was off wiki for 10 days due to eye surgery!!! LOL! However, this is an issue more for WP:MOS in general. For example, there is also the problem of people CHANGING facts or adding dependent clauses to articles within a sentence that totally contradict the citation! I run into this problem routinely. Too bad we simply cannot lock a cite to its content, but babysitting articles is probably inevitable. Having myself done significant editing on GA and FA class articles with over a hundred cites (see, e.g. Thoroughbred, Horses in warfare and Arabian horse among them), you can see where there gets to be a point of diminishing returns. I'd be kind of curious what kind of consensus would come out if you took this over to the talk page of WP:V, WP:CITE or WP:MOS. But in the meantime, Sandy and Ealdgyth have more FAs each than I do and they review FA nominees all the time, so I'll step out now and let them discuss more if they want to. Or not... anyway, good conversation and worthwhile discussion. Montanabw (talk) 01:14, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Good Discussion
Thanks for a good discussion. I may develop these ideas a little further and take the discussion to WP:MOS later on. I admit I am a stickler for citations. The first thing I do when I go to an article in wikipedia for my own research is check the bottom of the page and see how many cites there are. If I don't see any citations, I assume the article is no good and I go somewhere else for my information. I too get tired of "babysitting" articles I have contributed to ensure their integrity. It seems like there should be way to to automate the process of requiring citations for additions to mature articles and I think as wikipedia goes forward, these issues will start to take on more importance.

Best Regards,

Reservoirhill (talk) 03:56, 20 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, I have to admit that a lifetime commitment to wikipedia is probably not feasible for anyone! LOL! Yet, there has to be a balance between eternal babysitting and citation erosion that preserves the unique dynamism of wikipedia, which is its greatest strength but also its greatest weakness. I don't know what to do, other than to encourage new people to become committed editors. Luckily, I think I corrupted a couple of people that way!   Montanabw (talk) 05:37, 20 October 2008 (UTC)