Talk:Historical horse racing

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Instant Racing[edit]

(Conversation moved here from User talk:Banaticus)

Hi, I work for RaceTech (the company that manages Instant Racing) and made changes to the Instant Racing Wikipedia page---here is the response I got back:

Hello, I've reverted your changes to the Instant Racing article, for several reasons. You removed many of the footnotes from the article, and replaced cited information with uncited information, which goes against Wikipedia's verifiability policy. Some of your cites listed "RaceTech 2013", but there is no information about what this is referring to or where this information can be found. Also, some of the material gave the appearance of favoritism towards Instant Racing, such as the statistics about the increased purses in states that have it, violating our neutral point of view policy. You also removed information for no apparent reason, such as the information about Oregon. Please discuss any extensive changes on the article's talk page. Toohool (talk) 02:57, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

I can cite the exact sources of my information and of course, RaceTech has extensive material on our product, since we are the developers and managers of Instant Racing. Of course, we are proud of our product and how it has greatly helped the struggling thoroughbred racing industry--I do see your point about neutrality. However, the existing page puts Instant Racing in a very negative light, loaded with information about lawsuits, etc....We would like to find common ground that explains Instant Racing without any bias, one way or another.

Respectively,

Chuckhorse (talk) 17:18, 5 August 2014 (UTC) Steve Marcinak RaceTech ubet0008@hotmail.com[reply]

Wikipedia's neutrality policy is to reflect the points of view that appear in reliable sources, such as newspapers. Having skimmed over hundreds of articles about Instant Racing, I can say that a quite substantial portion of the coverage has been about the court battles over the machines' legality, so that's going to be reflected in the article. That said, I don't think the current text is really all that negative--there's probably as much space devoted to all the times that historical wagering has been approved by state legislatures and racing commissions as there is to the legal problems. Anyway, information about the positive effects of Instant Racing can be added if we have a good source. Your original edits were problematic because they seemed to be presenting raw statistics about race purses in an effort to make an argument in favor of Instant Racing (and those statistics were uncited). What would be acceptable would be, for example, a news article or editorial discussing the positive changes and their specific relation to Instant Racing.

As far as the "extensive material" that RaceTech has, this is not really usable from Wikipedia's perspective, unless it is publicly accessible. The requirement is verifiability, i.e. the ability of other editors to verify the citation. If you cite to internal company documents, nobody can verify that. Also, Wikipedia prefers citations to secondary sources like newspapers, rather than primary sources like company documents... but primary sources may be acceptable depending on the context.

Finally, please be aware of the conflict of interest guidelines. In short, since you work for the company behind Instant Racing, your direct editing of the article is strongly discouraged. It is preferred that you discuss potential changes here on the article talk page. Toohool (talk) 06:15, 6 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Quarter Horse machines in the 1980s[edit]

In Reno in 1985, casinos had machines similar to slot/video poker machines that worked like Instant Racing machines, except that they were quarter horse races over two furlongs, and the only information given was a set of odds set by the machine. -- That Don Guy (talk) 13:30, 6 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]