The Art of Natural Dressage

As some of you know, I'm working hard into the new forum of Andy Beck, linked to his web magazine AHM.

Following a link and another link and so on from the interesting posts there, I went back to Wikipedia, and I discovered this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_horsemanship

and I quote an interesting paragraph:



The interesting is, that "Art of Natural Dressage" is a "red link", that is, a link to a so far not existing page.... with an implicit encouragement to write it!

So here I am, asking you explicitly to write it. Only remember that wikipedia is a place where to share information - not opinions. Imagine to be a neutral reporter... It's absolutely impossible that your post turns out perfectly "neutral", but - as you'll see - it will be edited and expanded and so on...

_________________
Alex

How much fun is that! We're being talked about!

Well I took a deeper look.
A wiki user - Blastexx - introduced an article "Art of Natural Dressage", but probably the content was obviously promotional.... and it has been deleted.

As I told you, it's very difficult to write a neutral article if you're an enthusiast.

_________________
Alex

As perhaps I told you, I moved from wikipedia (the wiki enciclopedia) to wikisource (the wiki "free library"). Much fewer problems and NPOV (Neutral Point of View) issues... It only deals with searching, and re-publishing into wiki in a good format, bokks and sources free of copyright (t.i.: old).

Here the link to my recent works on the English wikisource: http://en.wikispurce.org/wiki/Wikisource:Horsemanship

By now I moved into Italian wikisource, and I'm working about one of ancient masterpieces of Italian Riding School, 16° century: Il cavalerizzo, by Claudio Corte.

Iìll take a look to AND Enciclopedia... something I'll like I guess!

_________________
Alex

Update... I moved to another version of Corte's book, edited in Venice, 1562: Ilcavallarizzo. In the meantime, I discovered too a online copy of the marvellous Bem cavalgar by Dom Duarte, King of Portugal, one of the masterpieces (and of rare documents) of medioeval horsemanship. You can browse it at Google books: http://books.google.com/books?id=dLMGAAAAQAAJ , or into Portuguese wikisource, here: http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Galeria:Bem_cavalgar.djvu were I hope that the book will be transcipred from images. It's ancient portuguese... not really simple to read.

_________________
Alex

ohh to me it sounds like all greek with the way Wikipedia and family works Much respect Alex for sharing al this knowledge!!

_________________

Bianca, it's really simple ... any wiki user does simply his best. Some user does incredibly hard and difficult jobs... other simply fix a single mispelled word... both contibutions - being free and into a cohoperative environment - are really significant and useful for the common community goal.

_________________
Alex

Happy to let you know that the new forum software runs, and, as I can see, all my posts are OK.

In the meantime, the transcription of Il cavallarizzo is finished, and I found a brasilian women, Cecilia, that can help me with the transcription of Bem Cavalgar on portuguese wikisource.

_________________
Alex

Great Alex!

_________________
www.equusuniversalis.com

Great news, Alex!

Could you give us your link? Then I'll place it too in the sticky on this forum with the other downloadable texts of old masters on-line.

_________________

New horse book: Mandala horses!

Never stop making mistakes! Natural Dressage

Yes obviously, with great pleasure!

here the Corte's book: http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Il_cavallarizzo (finished)
here the Dom Duarte book: http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Galeria:Bem_cavalgar.djvu (just started)

I uploaded into Commons other old equitation books, you can find them here: My djvu files ; the list is not complete.

As you know, any content of wiki is released under GFDL, t.i. you can do what you want with it. So, the publication of a good original, usable text (images of original pages are far from usable; often the OCR of such pages has a very low quality) is just the first effective step to work about them (translate them into modern language, if ancient, or in any other language). The best tool I found to work about a cooperative translation is Google Documents. Do you know such an unbeliavable tool?

_________________
Alex

I'm not sure why, but this link doesn't seem to work, do you know what's wrong with it?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User: ... djvu_files

Let's see if this stays in place, because it seems like in your message it was wrongfully shortened in some way.

_________________

New horse book: Mandala horses!

Never stop making mistakes! Natural Dressage

I edited the link into my message; now it runs, I hope. Do you have a djvu files reader installed? If you have, you can download the files and browse them offline. Some djvu file managing tools can be downloaded here: http://djvu.sourceforge.net/

_________________
Alex

Miriam mentioned some classic book that you can find online; many of them into the ENVL - Ecole Nationale Veterinaire - Lyon. Other interesting books in Gallica, Google Books, Internet Archive (mainly in English), some in Project Gutemberg.

All of them are PD . t.i. Public Domain. You can freely download them, and work about them. Europena rules tell that copyright fanishes when the author or the translator of a book is dead from more than 70 years. I.e. all the original books by L'Hotte are free by now (not their translations).

But - what means "online"? You can find online the scanned images of the pages only (ENVL, Gallica), or you can find a more or less readable text version too, usually generated by OCR from the scan (Google books, Internet Archive). The text quality is mainly low, sometimes very low. There's no formatting nor any hyperlink.

Wikisource collects scanned images and/or OCRs and, by a long, careful and hard human volunteer work, rewrites, reviews, and formats the text adding lots of hyperlinks too pointing to other wikisource entries or into other wiki projects. While doing such a very hard work (every evening, one or more hours, for months to work about Il cavallarizzo!), much value and reading confort is added - I hope - and I hope too that other join into such and adventure and work to other classicsm mainly into French wikisource.

Is it a simple work? Not at all: it's both time comsuming, and very difficult too. But... nothing about horses is so simple. And - if you'll be so bold to try - you'll find lots of help from wikisource community - consider that such a work is MUCH less controversial than Wikipedia work, therefore the wikisourcian community is MUCH more friendly.

Many of you colud contribute differently. If you own an old, PD book, you like to share it, and you have the facilities to scan it, you could send scans (or good copies) to a wikisourcian and they will be uploaded into wikisource, waiting for volunteers having the interest and the time to work about them. Remember... a text is PD 70+1 years after the death of the author or of the translator.

_________________
Alex

Some weeks ago, I sent an email to Ywonne Weltz, editor of The Horse's Hoof, asking her to consider to open a wiki for barefoot horse & related topics. As you know, it's possible, but very hard, to publish innovative ideas into Wikipedia, because it is a all-comprehensive enciclopedia, and a Neutral Point of View is mandatory. I (and you too I suppose) can't have a Neutral Point of View about our human-horse relationship style... better, we can do a major effort, but it's an agony.

Ywonne kindly and fastly answered me as usual - but she refused lacking needed time to approach so a huge project.

Wondering here and there into the web, I discovered http://www.ekopedia.org, a wiki where a ecological approach is the core of the project and a peculiar, not neutral point of view is perfectly allowed and encouraged. My home! There I can merge two from my three main interests: wiki and nature, and I'm working there a little. But... why don't try to add the third one, horses?

I searched for horses into ekopedia: nothing. So I wrote a message to Jean-Luc, the founder of the project eKopedia. Wiki is a strange environment, where all is public... personal talks too, so here any of you can freely read my talk with him.

Well, a couple of ideas for you.
1. I saw that a Enciclopedia project is running here, I ask your permission to use it as a source of data (obviously I will not "copy-and-paste", I'll use it as any other formal source, quoting it and merging it into reviews of other sources).
2. I invite any of you interested into ecology to take a look (consider that the project is small todate, it only grows with free contributions of active users) and to contribute into any field of you interest, if you like and if you can.
3. I'm going to introduce there something about human-horse relationship (I'll call it there "Equitation" just to understand what's the topic, but it will be something larger and different from equitation), any of you is invited to contribute. Keep into consideration that personal experiences can be reported, if they are relevant, informative and if they teach something useful from an ecological approach to life. AND philosophy does.

Ekopedia is a multilengual project - fr, en, de, it and other languages are currently used; fr project is presently the larger one. As in any other wiki project - I have to tell you the truth - it is very difficult to contribute for a beginner. This is well known, and you'll find lots of help by the community. Any mistake is fastly and friendly fixed by others. A special "wiki" mind is too needed, since contributors give their contribution under a free copyright - this means that anyone can edit it. Some people can't accept that their own contribution can be edited and changed by any other user... well, wiki is not the right place for them, there are lots of other communication tools into the web, where personal contribution is saved from editing.

_________________
Alex