Talk:Shackleford (horse)

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Good articleShackleford (horse) has been listed as one of the Sports and recreation good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
August 7, 2011Good article nomineeListed
Did You Know
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on June 1, 2011.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that before Shackleford won the 2011 Preakness Stakes, his owners had tried to sell him, but no one wanted to meet their reserve price?

Thanks[edit]

Thanks for getting this started; I'll let the people who do more with WP TB Racing fix up the format and pedigree stuff, but I threw in a couple things I heard the guys on TV mention (with source), and hope it helps! Montanabw(talk) 09:42, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Did a little bit of cleanup on everyone's previous edits. Feel free to revert anything I messed up. I mostly cut out extraneous statistics on other horses and toned down the adjectives a bit (would be good sportswriter prose, though unencyclopedic here!)(grin). I also dumped a lot of the parenthetical comments (because parentheticals are sort of going off on a tangent, which I do a lot, but only on talk pages...). I did a bit of overall wordsmithing and rephrasing where I thought it mght help.Montanabw(talk) 23:59, 24 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know much about horse and tried to add a lot of encyclopedic content outside of my area of expertise. I am sure I was using uncommon phrasing for horse racing fans and appreciate the assistance.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 03:00, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]


Fourth-generation[edit]

Hi Tony, I chopped the bit on the fourth generation because IMHO there is no particular significance to the horses being at that position in a pedigree, they are just one of a set of famous ancestors. It isn't a moral issue or anything, it just seems redundant trivia unless there is a real significance; past grandsire, it's not really very easy to track whose genes contributed what -- 12.5% by itself is statistically rather insignificant, IMHO. But I'm open to discussion on this. Montanabw(talk) 19:12, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No matter how great a chart is just saying Whoomp There It Is doesn't cut it:) Seriously, when you add tabular information it is correct to summarize it as you do any WP:RS for the reader. The horse may not have the greatest lineage, since almost all of his champion breeding ancestors were 4th generation or later. It is worth noting that he has one of the best lineups of fourth generation ancestors of all time. That is what we are noting in prose for the reader. I am not a horse guy and maybe it really does not make that big a difference, but since most pedigree tables I have seen either go 4 or 5 generations, I am summarizing what seems to me to be important.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 19:35, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The lead in about the fourth generation ancestors should probably be shortened. I agree that they are worth mentioning, but I also agree with Montanabw that an entire paragraph should not be devoted to such distant ancestors. It is actually quite common for most of the US-based racehorses to have Secretariat or Northern Dancer (one of the most prolific sires of all time) in their bloodlines a few generations back, especially on the paternal lineage. Better to focus on the parents and a few lines about the grandparents. Froggerlaura (talk) 20:34, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Right now the article is barely 7KB text and the general consensus is that 60KB is a full blown WP analysis of a subject. I think other sections should be expanded rather than have these 4 sentences shrunk. The fact that most Triple Crown race champions have strong bloodlines does not mean it should be excluded from their articles. It means that the differences between each strong pedigree should be explained. I know for a aport that I know I would describe extensively high school and college All-American credentials as part of an analysis of any great pro athlete rather than have a WP article that says that "This guys is another one of those run of the mill All-Americans whose details you can track down on your own."--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 20:59, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
All I really wanted to cut was the "fourth generation" bit, it's worth mentioning that the horse has famous ancestors, but that far back, it's irrelevant in which generation they appear, anything past grandparents is not going to necessarily be all that genetically significant; there are cow ponies that trace to Secretariat in the 4th generation, bless their hearts. The beauty and weakness of wikipedia is always that question of how much trivia to include in a given article and what can be handled with a wikilink. I'm mostly for keeping the text flowing and not being bogged down with excessive stats in general. Montanabw(talk) 20:53, 30 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Admittedly the correlation between having strong breeding 4th gen ancestors and success is less than 1st or 2nd gen, but since all pedigree charts I ever see are either 4 or 5 generation charts, we need to describe in prose to the reader the content of those charts and why one horse has different good pedigree than another with good pedigree. I think the text places adequate weight on his immediate ancestors.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 21:55, 30 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Stat chart[edit]

I propose adding this stat chart to summarize his racing history.Froggerlaura (talk) 20:15, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review[edit]

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Reviewing
This review is transcluded from Talk:Shackleford (horse)/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: ♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:07, 7 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Starting read through.♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:07, 7 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Lead
  • "His pedigree traces to major sires of significance. " Could you perhaps mention some of his most famous sires after this?
Three year old season
  • What exactly is the XpressBet Consolation Bonus? How does it work? Should this be wiki-linked with an article?
  • "Down the backstretch the leaders slowed the pace down as both moved around the track together, clocking 3⁄4-mile (1,200 m) in 1:12 flat." -citation needed.
  • What is meant by "on a sloppy track. " -Poor quality, slippery/soggy or what? Please reword.
Pedigree
Pedigree of Shackleford table
Sources

Can you ref the earnings of $1,701,666 in the infobox?♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:48, 7 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

  1. Is it reasonably well written?
    A. Prose quality:
    B. MoS compliance:
  2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?
    A. References to sources:
    B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:
    C. No original research:
  3. Is it broad in its coverage?
    A. Major aspects:
    B. Focused:
  4. Is it neutral?
    Fair representation without bias:
  5. Is it stable?
    No edit wars, etc:
  6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?
    A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:
    B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:
  7. Overall:
    Pass or Fail:

Seems to meet all of the requirements for GA. Considering the short "career" of the horse to date it is satisfactory, but you'll need to update it regularly in the coming seasons. I doubt it could ever become a featured article, at least not the the near future. The prose could still do with a little work in places as some of the sentences can be quite hard to read. A little too much reliance on Equibase.com also. Overall not bad though.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:27, 7 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Table Solution (of sorts)[edit]

Have you noticed how the stats table eats up the heading of the "Tabulated Pedigree"? Well if you put a full stop on the line after the table, it won't do that anymore. There must be a better way of doing this but it works and it looks OK- see article TeofiloTigerboy1966 (talk) 12:02, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Date fix[edit]

I have reformated the table so that it now sorts correctly by date- before it was putting the months in alphabetical order. However, the dates are in "Fourth of July" rather than "July Fourth" format (can't help it, I'm British!). It would be easy to swap them around if you prefer.Tigerboy1966 (talk) 20:35, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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