Talk:Byerley Turk

Untitled[edit]

There is a horse called "Delete this one also"? Born 2012? Can somebody please check this? I think it's just a sloppy source. --Legolas558 (talk) 15:01, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for pointing this out. If the horse does exist he has never won a race of any consequence. A lot of names have been added with no particular rationale. Tigerboy1966 16:38, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Spelling[edit]

In this article BYERLEY is 5 times written as BYERLY - could somebody please check? Many thanks! Greetings from Seriengenialitäten (talk) 20:36, 1 February 2017 (UTC)Seriengenialitäten[reply]

Byerley is the name of his owner and the generally accepted spelling of the name of the horse. Byerly is a misspelling that goes back to the original entry in the General Stud Book, which we quote. Some sources go with the spelling in the GSB entry and thus use Byerly. Should we add this to the article? Jlvsclrk (talk) 22:19, 1 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I would, yes. Montanabw^(talk) 05:51, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Added some detail and a bit more about the mystery of his origins. Probably needs a good copy edit. Do you think we should add naming as a topic in the Thoroughbred article? The NYT article on the Pharoah misspelling is a good source. Jlvsclrk (talk) 11:07, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure, maybe just add to the Jockey Club articles (US and UK). TB is a FA and I would't add it there without talk page discussion. Montanabw^(talk) 23:33, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Origins[edit]

Origins of this horse are a minefield; the Akhal-Teke people want to claim him, but the modern Akhal-Teke is not necessarily the ancient Turkoman horse, which may or may not have been what the Byerley Turk was -- all anyone knows is that maybe he was captured from the Ottomans -- I've got some DNA study stuff and I will dig, but so far it all says who he sired, not where he may have originated. The bottom line is that it's all speculation (and a bit of sloppy research published by a recent popular horse magazine writer that I will not mention here). We just want to stay real close to what can be sourced. Montanabw ^(talk) 06:08, 26 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Bloodlines.net has a decent start on the controversy. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:44, 26 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, the article is using it as a source already. I double-checked it just yesterday. Montanabw ^(talk) 00:00, 27 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

As an aside, I was rather irritated at the articles published by above-mentioned "popular horse magazine writer" who was one of the people who opened this door to the Akhal-Tekes-were-TB-ancestor claims. (FWIW, if you've followed that article there is actually a serious concern that the Turkmenistan government has been bringing in TBs to cross on ATs -- irony of ironies...) Said writer, once upon a time, seemed to be a decent researcher, but I'm now starting to wonder about everything she's written; her set of articles supposedly debunking the Arabian influence on the Thoroughbred was so poorly done -- I've read the research -- that I wonder if she was similarly sloppy in a lot of her other work. Her conformation studies were once pretty good when she was writing books, but recently she's gotten so hung up on placing dots on her own drawings that I wonder if she is just creating a personality cult. Montanabw ^(talk) 00:00, 27 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This author? Ealdgyth - Talk 00:09, 27 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think so; I don't care for her stuff either. So before you buy a horse now, you're supposed to upload a picture of it to the computer and photoshop it 50 different ways to determine it's conformation? What happened to looking at horses the way people have for 5,000 years? 😕 White Arabian Filly ^Neigh 22:17, 27 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Um **cough**, she needs to stick to palentology; I think that's where her doctorate was. Her earlier work in the 1990s on conformation (that three-book sequence) was originally pretty good and for awhile I really thought she knew what she was talking about. Now, I tend to view all she writes with suspicion -- she still has a lot of good observations, but then she'll go off on a tangent that is pure nonsense. On a cursory glance, that article you've linked looks typical -- looks mostly right on the original palentology, until she goes off on her four foundations-as-subspecies thing as if it was equally established, which I really used to think had merit until we wound up debunking that whole theory here on-wiki. It's clear she doesn't like that genetics is calling her whole field into question). Montanabw ^(talk) 19:13, 29 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That said, WAF is dead-on right about how now she advocates uploading pictures to a computer, (and preferably hers, for a fee) ... there's a cult of personality thing going on. I was rather irritated at that series she ran in a particular magazine (that we probably all subscribe to) where she took GOBS of images from wikipedia many without attribution, and I even caught a couple of phrasings that may have been "closely paraphrased" from the work we've done here. I can read a genetic study better than she can, and I am not a trained scientist... oh wait, I have trained to interpret texts for meaning... ah! Sorry, I am ranting. Montanabw ^(talk) 19:13, 29 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]