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I moved the history stuff down to a new section, specifically for it; it didn't really belong in with the temperament stuff, especially at the top. I changed the information on weights to make it less America-centric -- I have found one standard allows weights up to 4 kg (though most of them call for lower weights). I made a few minor phrasing tweaks.
Put it under the "care" section, outlining a "normal" Maltese, without excessive professional grooming or much done to curb the slight tear stain she has. Its main point is to show the cuteness of a Maltese, even without long hair or professional grooming.
The weight of 15# or 8 kg is considered way above standard in all the different kennel clubs. The Maltese is a Toy dog and Toy dogs should generally be under 10# or 4.6 kg. A 15# Maltese probably has Bichon Frisé or Miniature Poodle in its bloodlines. maltmomma
Maltese are a very gentle breed of dog and were once called Spaniel Gentle. Generally the breed is not a biting type. I left in information about biting but I don't think it is really relevent. maltmomma
I am gathering information and will add it. Where do you suggest I put the sources? maltmomma
In a section titled "References". There seems to be a push to have references for all articles. Elf | Talk 20:07, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
I want to make it as accurate as possible and will add a resource section with the information. maltmomma
When my mother got a Maltese, she chose the breed specifically because all her reading on the topic said that Maltese dogs are so gentle with children, you have to be careful -- not that the dog will hurt the child, but that the child will hurt the dog! This has been true in my experience of Maleteses. My mom's dog, for instance, will let my nephews torture him, and hardly even barks at them. If you go to http://www.americanmaltese.org/amabreedinfo.htm and skim down to "Temperment" that'll back up what I'm saying. Lorettagrace
I replaced the material that the anonymous user 149.63.96.145 removed for no apparent reason; it's a well-known issue with the Maltese breed and is considered pertinent information. maltmomma 17:23, May 21, 2005 (UTC) im having funnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!! maltase rock!!!!!!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.37.129.187 ( talk) 01:37, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
Parts of this article have been taken verbatum from various sites, such as [1], [2] (from a book) and [3]. Very little seems original to the article. Please consider rewriting the article in your own words (rather than simply taking them from other sources).
Mel "MelSkunk" Smith 2 July 2005 04:51 (UTC)
Hi, I did not take the information from these sites. I don't know about anyone else here. The first site, I've never heard of. The second site quoted the same references that I gave at the bottom of this article and the third is the standard given by the AKC that is used everywhere. maltmomma July 2, 2005 12:37 (UTC)
I have never heard of Rose Wilder Lane owning a Maltese dog. I have a rather long compilation of famous owners and have never come across her name in my research. I Googled it and was unable to make a hit. Can the anon. editor point to where we can find this information? If not, after a time, I will remove it until we can find info. to substantiate this. Maltmomma (chat) 02:56, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
Maltese dogs have hair, not fur, so they do not shed. Because they have hair and not fur they are excellent dogs for people who suffer from asthma or animal related allergies. Rlinds01 ( talk) 01:58, 30 October 2008 (UTC) I would like to know if Malteses are good for asthma.
Yes they are because they don't shed.
A couple of websites mention that early/proto- Malteses were used for rodent control, with the implication that the original value was this task. Is it OK to put the web addresses here? I mention this because most sources imply the dog's value was its cuteness. Certainly my own experience (original research?) is that my bitch is very keen to despatch mice and rats! Gordon | Talk, 16 April 2006 @ 12:00 UTC
I've modified like anomimal user the origin in Infobox to Malta in Central Mediterranean region (Italy)... reading Fci standards,IMHO it seems more correct it:User:Brodo -- 83.184.35.129 10:47, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
I've removed the anecdote about "Snobal" until Summerdog12 cares to supply a valid verification. Gordon | Talk, 14 May 2006 @ 12:10 UTC
Ummm... OK, this is not deathless prose here. OTH, what's so horrible about it? Gordon | Talk, 5 June 2006 @05:45 UTC
I added a picture of a maltese that i think is adorable and speaks well for the breed. I added it before but it got deleted. If someone has a reason why it should be deleted please tell me. Thanks -- Tobyw87 20:36, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
A picture with the Maltese with text underneath stated it was "adorable", this doesn't sound very encyclopedic to me because what is adorable or not is subjective. I did keep the picture though even though it doesn't really express any idea, but it is damn cute. 1607m4dsk1llz 04:23, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Um, isn't this phrased a little odd? "A small breed of white dog?" That suggests white dog is a species in itself. Shouldn't it be a "small white breed of dog" or "a small white dog breed?" Dead men's bells 18:35, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
"Because of their size, Maltese dogs are not a good choice for families with small children because they can be easily injured."
Who can be easily injured? The Maltese or the small children?
The dogs can be injured, Not the children. Puplover4 @ 2:51 PM December 14th
Shouldn't this be Maltese (dog)? The breed is called "maltese" not "moltese dog". It used to be there but somebody moved it and now it can't be moved back except by an admin. Are there any admins around?-- WilliamThweatt 01:03, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I added a picture of a maltese puppy with long-ish hair. I'll understand if someone has to remove it. Macken985 17:54, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
I changed the main picture for the Maltese page. If someone is looking to buy a dog and they look here to see pictures, they might change their decision after seeing two long haired Maltese dogs and thinking that that's what all Malteses look like. Most pet owners prefer puppy cuts and think their cuter, so this way, they get to see both cuts, instead of two of the same, ugly (in my opinion as well as many others) cuts. Anyquestions 13:59, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!! Finally somebody else who thinks the same way I do. Everytime I look at a book or website it shows a maltese with really long hair. I have a maltese and my puppy has short hair. I think there should be a variety of pictures here. (some with long hair and others with short.):)4 December 2007
I have expanded the intro, as per the tooshort template (and removed the template). I have also upgraded some grammar, broken some paragraphs apart for ease of reading, and created two new sections, Conformation champions and Cross-bred Maltese. The latter covers something i added (Tiffany, the movie dog) and something already in the article, namely, the Llasa-Apso-Maltese cross-breed dogs. cat Catherineyronwode 10:36, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
Quick facts need to be in prose form. IMHO. miranda 17:46, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
I want to know what is the right month or age to own a baby Maltese —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.162.160.31 ( talk) 23:40, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
Well some people reasd those wrong anser artcles but here is the real inf on maltese's. So maltese's usually way up to 7 ponds but it is okay if it ways a little over. If you maaltese is over wheigth that is npot good at all. Also there coat is very whight so make sure they get b athed at least 1 time a weak. Some maltese's could have allegies so becareful what you give them too. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mickey1290 ( talk • contribs) 14:08, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
Pietru il-Boqli a.k.a the roof of this court is too high to be yours and Tool2Die4 reverted without even looking at the source. The origin of the Maltese is not exactly defined. The FCI recognized as the area of origin the Central Mediterranean Area and the Asian Continent is also mentioned by some scientists. -- Imbris ( talk) 01:11, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
Pietru il-Boqli a.k.a the roof of this court is too high to be yours wrote "if you prefer, we can find a better source of information (the one being used is hardly excellent) which doesn't mention any Adriatic islands or Sicilian towns at all."
I hope that he meant sources in accordance with WP:SOURCE, which is a big difference.
Short introductory to the issue:
We cannot use various personal blogs and different salesman/breeders websites as relevant if they do not cite where they found the information. There are a bunch of cut-copy-paste websites that use Wikipedia as its only source.
Here is a rare example of interpretation of the Wikipedia article on the Maltese by an outside user:
No matter how much of such personal/salesman websites could be collected we cannot deem those reliable simply on the basis of statistics.
There are currently a lot of pages on this topic (Maltese (dog)) that cut-copy-paste the text from Wikipedia word by word.
Pietru il-Boqli refused to talk about the content and continued to vandalise, denied Greek and Roman sources, laughs at the very mention of Mljet and has very abusive approach towards other editors of this article.
Imbris ( talk) 02:10, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
Hopefully the conflict over this article (about a fluffy little white dog, btw) will finally be resolved. the roof of this court is too high to be yours ( talk) 00:47, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
I simply object to pushing the Yugoslav POV as though such a thing were acceptable. As you can see (have you re-read the article?) many of your suggestions have been incorporated. The wheat has been separated from the chaff. the roof of this court is too high to be yours ( talk) 01:28, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Maltese dog/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.
Are you people crazy - you never hit a dog.
Your comments:Many local counties recommend physical discipline to prevent yapping, such as sharp hits to the back of the head or foot twisting when the animal barks - should be taken out of this article. This is illegal in our state. Why is the page locked? |
Last edited at 17:13, 3 February 2009 (UTC). Substituted at 21:19, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 |
The history section starts with an apparently spurious claim about the Latin name of the breed. The source cited makes no mention of canis melitaeus. Besides, canis melitaeus appears in very different connection in some other sources. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sjlain ( talk • contribs) 17:43, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
Hello everyone, I have removed the image "Maltese dog behavior" from the article because it wasn't descriptive enough to show the actual "behavioral traits" of the dog breed. Please add a good image in the place of the old one. Thank you, Dinan Blueje ( talk) 01:08, 31 August 2019 (UTC)
Provocation, irrelevant to improvement of this article |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Template:Infobox dog breed has a parameter for "patronage", and explains its meaning as:
We can sort-of conclude from this that when a dog breed's specific country of origin is not known, then its "patronage" is the place where the breed was developed. Because the Maltese originated in the Central Mediterranean Area, and was developed into the breed we love today in Italy, its patronage is Italy. I'm still not sure why "Maltese" should be translated into Italian on an English Wikipedia article? Has there been a consensus reached about this someplace? Magnolia677 ( talk) 21:04, 18 January 2020 (UTC)
as far as a new consensus is reached the previous consensual version is kept, or at least this is the way things work in Wikipedia, i.e. when an edit (in this case the removal) is challenged the previous version will be kept until a new consensus is reached in a discussion... I hoped that "Magnolia677" would leave his personal feelings and interests out of this issues and give the example as expected from his older position, but I was totally wrong, I overestimated his intellectual honesty and personal dignity, my bad. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.64.182.255 ( talk) 08:00, 19 January 2020 (UTC)
151.64.164.170 has approached a few of us wanting to know "Please tell us your opinion about the unmotivated removal of the Italian pronunciation which has been in the age for years and provided further information to the readers until it was removed without consensus".
I concur with editor Justlettersandnumbers - your personal views regarding other editors is irrelevant. Material can be removed from Wikipedia under
WP:BOLD - Wikipedia is not a static undertaking that is set in concrete. In my opinion, the Italian pronunciation is irrelevant to the article - this is not Wiktionary nor a course in the lingua italiana - and I and others support its removal. It is now removed with consensus; QED.
William Harris
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We read in our article that "Linnaeus wrote in 1792 that these dogs were about the size of a squirrel". That's quite an achievement, considering that he died in 1778. I intend to remove that paragraph unless proper sources are provided, including the page number where Linnaeus posthumously made this observation (there is a work by Gmelin published in 1792 on the mammalia of Linnaeus, but it does not seem to contain this statement). I'm tempted to remove the Joe Fulda source altogether as patently unreliable. Thoughts? Justlettersandnumbers ( talk) 00:03, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
I'm opening this thread not to talk about users but precisaly about the matter written in the title: the Italian pronunciation of the name "Maltese". I'm asking everyone to read the explanations below and answer about this matter.
The page "Maltese (dog)" has been starting for years with the following words: "The Maltese (Italian: [malˈteːze])". The haead paragraph has been containing the pronunciation of the name in Italian for all this time, nobody has ever challenged its presence and so it was the stable consensual version. The reason there was the pronunciation in Italian is that, in this particular case (not in general), the word "Maltese" can be pronounced non only in English but also in Italian. "Maltese" is the Italian word indicating this particular dog breed. "Maltese", in this case, in English doesn't mean "from Malta", it derives from a Semitic word ("màlat") from the which also the name "Malta" and others derive ( Fédération Cynologique Internationale). More, the origin of the dog isn't "the island of Malta" but generically "the Central Mediterranean Sea area", which includes Malta and Italy. The patronage of the dog breed is Italian (FCI). It follows from what I've explained that this dog breed is linked to Italy, not to Malta, except for its name which coincides with the English adjective meaning "from Malta".
For those who don't know, in Wikipedia it's very common including in the head paragraph a foreign pronunciation when the word (or name) can be pronounced in a foreign language, in order to give the reader one more information, which is nothing bad at all. Al Pacino and De Niro are American actors, their surnames are normally and correctly pronounced in English, but next to the English pronunciation it's indicated also the Italian pronunciation ("(/pəˈtʃiːnoʊ/, Italian: [paˈtʃiːno])" "(/də ˈnɪəroʊ/, Italian: [de ˈniːro])"): better one more piece of information for the readers, who perhaps won't read and so it'll be useless, than one less, which perhaps would be searched and not found. The word "pasta" is commonly used in English (both British and American) and pronounced /ˈpæstə/ or /ˈpɑːstə/ (as written in the head paragraph of the article), but it's indicated also the Italian pronunciation [ˈpasta]: again, better one more piece of information than one less. And this is exactly the reason why the "Help:IPA/languageX" template exist, not just for Italian but for every language. Removing the Italian pronunciation from those pages would be couterproductive, it wouldn't be a useful edit and I frankly can't see how it could ever be, I hope that everyone concurs. The same goes for "Maltese", which is commonly pronounced as the English adjective meaning "from Malta" (/mɑlˈtiz/ or /mɒlˈtiːz/) but could be pronounced also in Italian, as it's an Italian dog breed. Same speech as for pasta.
I light of all this, do you think that the Italian pronunciation must be removed from the article or have you convinced yourself that removing it wouldn't be an improvement but a worsening? @ Justlettersandnumbers, Cavalryman, and William Harris: I'm addressing you in particular but also whoever wants to write down his/her opinion. I didn't mention the wrong way this whole thing has been dealt with, i.e. without respecting the rules of Wikipedia itself, but the only thing I'm interested in is giving you correct information about this matter and read your opinions. 151.64.186.73 ( talk) 10:22, 21 January 2020 (UTC)
What we definitely do not do is include, for example, the Italian and Japanese pronunciation for things pertaining to Afghanistan or Australia. And consideration of this incidentally brings to light some WP:NOR problems in the article (in summary: commingling landraces and breeds; commingling 9 historical breeds with one modern one; mistaking ancient folklore and ambiguous medieval claims for modern-researched history). While there's a bit of an Italian cultural-historical connection to Malta (today mostly a language-intelligibility one due to media broadcasts), there doesn't seem to be any such Italian connection to this dog breed (neither culturally nor genetically), which in a strict sense of breed definition post-dates Malta's independence from Italy [or part of what became Italy, the Kingdom of Sicily, in 1530, and which even then was House of Anjou territory and thus had stronger ties to France anyway). Since then, Malta was controlled by France and England/UK, until full independence in 1964 (or 1979, depending on definitions). Meanwhile, as a breed in the modern sense, the variety (or varieties, really – at least 9 of them, of unknown inter-relationship) appear to date to the 17th century at the earliest, developed from local landrace dogs, and was/were not formalized with breed standards (which do not all agree with each other) until the early-to-mid-20th c. The sourcing we have so far seems to indicate it is most closely related to dogs of Switzerland and the south of France – not Italy. While there are written records of dogs purportedly from the area, going back to at least the 4th c. BCE, there's no reason to consider them all a single breed, and some specific pre-modern sources of this type have been challenged as to their meaning (e.g. referring to Méléda, not Malta, and with English writers of the Early Modern period seeming to show a bias in their interpretation). Our article needs to be re-written to better reflect all this, focusing on the dog breed history (including relationships to mainland dogs) and standardization as can be established using reliable modern sources; and separately treating pre-modern dogs of Malta, the historical claims about those and their veracity, and what modern sources suggest about how those dogs may relate to the modern breed[s]. I've done similar "separate facts from folklore" and "distinguish between landraces and standardized breeds" edits at several other breed articles, e.g. Cyprus cat, which may serve as a good model.
PS (and this is a long ramble leading up to a Wikipedia essay; it's time I did another
WP:Common sense piece as a non-human followup to
WP:Race and ethnicity): There's a strong element of what I would call "the fallacy of the perpetual breed" at work here and in many other articles. Animal breeds are not fixed (within a human time-frame of reference) like sculptures or continents; they are an ongoing process and they change over time, more like gardens or political borders. It's just how genetics works. No breed extant right now will still exist in 200 years – except perhaps in name but very different form, like what's happened with the
Persian cat over less than a century; or perhaps in similar form due to forced artificial selection but as cross-breeds with very different genetics through admixture to "recover" traits lost in the original stock (cf. ). When researchers (on our site or off of it) note that a modern breed (of anything) – subject to highly controlled attempts to breed-true very specific traits to a published breed standard – is mostly white (or whatever), and they find a source from 137 CE claiming white dogs were seen in the same area, it's just patent nonsense to leap to the idea that they're the same dogs and represent a continual process of breed refinement of the same breed. It's anti-scientific
WP:FRINGE. And its very rare for us to have pre-modern evidence of strictly controlled selection. More often, common breeders selected from whatever healthy livestock was available within a few villages away, or at a major market in the nearest proper town. These were adapted to their environment – this is how landraces develop. A select few aristocrats with a lot of time on their hands had the wherewithal to be much more selective, but were concerned with results (e.g. breed Baron von Snuffleporp's unusually fast hounds to mine, so I get faster dogs for my hunts), not with the establishment and perpetuation of some kind of "subsubspecies" as a named breed with standards. That's an entirely modern preoccupation dating to the late Victoria era, and probably itself has a finite lifespan of another century or less. We know for a fact now how
genetic bottlenecks work, what
hybrid vigor is, and that long-sustained fairly close inbreeding (e.g. first- or second-cousin to cousin, over and over again) can cause more genetic damage than rare closer (e.g. sibling) inbreeding. Lots of overly-inbred formal breeds are due for extinction as their genomes degrade, and this is more true among dog breeds than any other sector. Meanwhile, new breeds are being established by crossbreeding to avoid such problems, and themselves will ultimately have a finite range of viable breeding within the same breed. Even livestock breeding is increasingly shifting to the devising of new crossbreeds and even interspecific hybrids, not rote maintenance of old bloodlines. It's interesting that the perpetual-breed fallacy also pertains to humans and also dates mostly to the same era and earlier:
eugenics first arose in the Victorian period, as did a lot of wacky and pseudo-anthropological ideas about "
race", though some of it goes back to the 15th century; that stuff commingled with a common belief in the "breeding" superiority of the upper class (despite obvious evidence to the contrary like porphyria, color-blindness, lantern-jaw, etc.), and even a very frequent practice among commoners of first- and second-cousin marriages to keep land and other inheritance in the same family; plus sweeping romantic notions about what we'd today call ethnicity, e.g. the
Celtic Twilight and
German Romanticism, grounded in false beliefs that, say, the Irish and the Nordic peoples represent untainted lines of human breeding and culture to ancient times, yadda yadda yadda. To bring this back to breeds: the genetics are simply going to adapt to local conditions and available genes to mix with, as with any life form. Various discrete elements of the genetic makeup (haplogroups) are going to remain stable over a long period of time, and are not strongly affected by shallow levels of crossbreeding nor overwhelmingly corrupted by a few inbreeding instances (like a few drops of soy sauce in a large pot of water), because the overall genetic pool is stable, as is the environment to which it is long-term adapted. Where you're going to get a distinct-breed effect is when focused artificial selection (controlled breeding) is applied rather consistently – like dumping an entire pint of soy sauce into the pot. But even then genetics are not magically undone; the same forces of adaptation, mutation, dominant and recessive inheritance, etc., are all still in operation and largely outside of breeders' control. It's not possible to maintain exactly the same breed over a long period time.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
01:20, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
IP, just call an WP:RfC and get formal consensus regarding your proposal. Atsme Talk 📧 17:54, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
Dogs are no respecter of national boundaries. Nor were dog fanciers. Breeds appeared and were reproduced (sometimes badly) all over the world.
This is not unlike the constant nattering about the national origins of
Tadeusz Kościuszko or
Nikola Tesla, which I find boring and unproductive. Who know for sure? Who can? And given that international boundaries and allegiances have shifted subtly and at time grossly, what are we taking about.
7&6=thirteen (
☎)
17:20, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Dcesaire.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 03:12, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
The article has had for some time a tag (This article's lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points). I worked in providing it with an introduction, so I guess the tag can go now. Also, the previous lead didn't make much sense: "Despite the name, it has no verified historic or scientific connection to the island of Malta": well, it has been claimed to come from the island of Malta since Strabo 2000 years ago, and has been reported through the centuries to have been bred there, so it does have a historic connection to the island - by the way the introduction was written, it seemed like the breed name was just a coincidental homonym and not actually the same word as the one meaning "relating to Malta", which is not the case. It would make more sense to have something more in line with [ Britannica], which states in its introduction that it is named for the island of Malta, where it may have originated. Dan Palraz ( talk)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 |
I moved the history stuff down to a new section, specifically for it; it didn't really belong in with the temperament stuff, especially at the top. I changed the information on weights to make it less America-centric -- I have found one standard allows weights up to 4 kg (though most of them call for lower weights). I made a few minor phrasing tweaks.
Put it under the "care" section, outlining a "normal" Maltese, without excessive professional grooming or much done to curb the slight tear stain she has. Its main point is to show the cuteness of a Maltese, even without long hair or professional grooming.
The weight of 15# or 8 kg is considered way above standard in all the different kennel clubs. The Maltese is a Toy dog and Toy dogs should generally be under 10# or 4.6 kg. A 15# Maltese probably has Bichon Frisé or Miniature Poodle in its bloodlines. maltmomma
Maltese are a very gentle breed of dog and were once called Spaniel Gentle. Generally the breed is not a biting type. I left in information about biting but I don't think it is really relevent. maltmomma
I am gathering information and will add it. Where do you suggest I put the sources? maltmomma
In a section titled "References". There seems to be a push to have references for all articles. Elf | Talk 20:07, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
I want to make it as accurate as possible and will add a resource section with the information. maltmomma
When my mother got a Maltese, she chose the breed specifically because all her reading on the topic said that Maltese dogs are so gentle with children, you have to be careful -- not that the dog will hurt the child, but that the child will hurt the dog! This has been true in my experience of Maleteses. My mom's dog, for instance, will let my nephews torture him, and hardly even barks at them. If you go to http://www.americanmaltese.org/amabreedinfo.htm and skim down to "Temperment" that'll back up what I'm saying. Lorettagrace
I replaced the material that the anonymous user 149.63.96.145 removed for no apparent reason; it's a well-known issue with the Maltese breed and is considered pertinent information. maltmomma 17:23, May 21, 2005 (UTC) im having funnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!! maltase rock!!!!!!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.37.129.187 ( talk) 01:37, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
Parts of this article have been taken verbatum from various sites, such as [1], [2] (from a book) and [3]. Very little seems original to the article. Please consider rewriting the article in your own words (rather than simply taking them from other sources).
Mel "MelSkunk" Smith 2 July 2005 04:51 (UTC)
Hi, I did not take the information from these sites. I don't know about anyone else here. The first site, I've never heard of. The second site quoted the same references that I gave at the bottom of this article and the third is the standard given by the AKC that is used everywhere. maltmomma July 2, 2005 12:37 (UTC)
I have never heard of Rose Wilder Lane owning a Maltese dog. I have a rather long compilation of famous owners and have never come across her name in my research. I Googled it and was unable to make a hit. Can the anon. editor point to where we can find this information? If not, after a time, I will remove it until we can find info. to substantiate this. Maltmomma (chat) 02:56, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
Maltese dogs have hair, not fur, so they do not shed. Because they have hair and not fur they are excellent dogs for people who suffer from asthma or animal related allergies. Rlinds01 ( talk) 01:58, 30 October 2008 (UTC) I would like to know if Malteses are good for asthma.
Yes they are because they don't shed.
A couple of websites mention that early/proto- Malteses were used for rodent control, with the implication that the original value was this task. Is it OK to put the web addresses here? I mention this because most sources imply the dog's value was its cuteness. Certainly my own experience (original research?) is that my bitch is very keen to despatch mice and rats! Gordon | Talk, 16 April 2006 @ 12:00 UTC
I've modified like anomimal user the origin in Infobox to Malta in Central Mediterranean region (Italy)... reading Fci standards,IMHO it seems more correct it:User:Brodo -- 83.184.35.129 10:47, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
I've removed the anecdote about "Snobal" until Summerdog12 cares to supply a valid verification. Gordon | Talk, 14 May 2006 @ 12:10 UTC
Ummm... OK, this is not deathless prose here. OTH, what's so horrible about it? Gordon | Talk, 5 June 2006 @05:45 UTC
I added a picture of a maltese that i think is adorable and speaks well for the breed. I added it before but it got deleted. If someone has a reason why it should be deleted please tell me. Thanks -- Tobyw87 20:36, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
A picture with the Maltese with text underneath stated it was "adorable", this doesn't sound very encyclopedic to me because what is adorable or not is subjective. I did keep the picture though even though it doesn't really express any idea, but it is damn cute. 1607m4dsk1llz 04:23, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Um, isn't this phrased a little odd? "A small breed of white dog?" That suggests white dog is a species in itself. Shouldn't it be a "small white breed of dog" or "a small white dog breed?" Dead men's bells 18:35, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
"Because of their size, Maltese dogs are not a good choice for families with small children because they can be easily injured."
Who can be easily injured? The Maltese or the small children?
The dogs can be injured, Not the children. Puplover4 @ 2:51 PM December 14th
Shouldn't this be Maltese (dog)? The breed is called "maltese" not "moltese dog". It used to be there but somebody moved it and now it can't be moved back except by an admin. Are there any admins around?-- WilliamThweatt 01:03, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I added a picture of a maltese puppy with long-ish hair. I'll understand if someone has to remove it. Macken985 17:54, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
I changed the main picture for the Maltese page. If someone is looking to buy a dog and they look here to see pictures, they might change their decision after seeing two long haired Maltese dogs and thinking that that's what all Malteses look like. Most pet owners prefer puppy cuts and think their cuter, so this way, they get to see both cuts, instead of two of the same, ugly (in my opinion as well as many others) cuts. Anyquestions 13:59, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!! Finally somebody else who thinks the same way I do. Everytime I look at a book or website it shows a maltese with really long hair. I have a maltese and my puppy has short hair. I think there should be a variety of pictures here. (some with long hair and others with short.):)4 December 2007
I have expanded the intro, as per the tooshort template (and removed the template). I have also upgraded some grammar, broken some paragraphs apart for ease of reading, and created two new sections, Conformation champions and Cross-bred Maltese. The latter covers something i added (Tiffany, the movie dog) and something already in the article, namely, the Llasa-Apso-Maltese cross-breed dogs. cat Catherineyronwode 10:36, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
Quick facts need to be in prose form. IMHO. miranda 17:46, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
I want to know what is the right month or age to own a baby Maltese —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.162.160.31 ( talk) 23:40, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
Well some people reasd those wrong anser artcles but here is the real inf on maltese's. So maltese's usually way up to 7 ponds but it is okay if it ways a little over. If you maaltese is over wheigth that is npot good at all. Also there coat is very whight so make sure they get b athed at least 1 time a weak. Some maltese's could have allegies so becareful what you give them too. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mickey1290 ( talk • contribs) 14:08, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
Pietru il-Boqli a.k.a the roof of this court is too high to be yours and Tool2Die4 reverted without even looking at the source. The origin of the Maltese is not exactly defined. The FCI recognized as the area of origin the Central Mediterranean Area and the Asian Continent is also mentioned by some scientists. -- Imbris ( talk) 01:11, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
Pietru il-Boqli a.k.a the roof of this court is too high to be yours wrote "if you prefer, we can find a better source of information (the one being used is hardly excellent) which doesn't mention any Adriatic islands or Sicilian towns at all."
I hope that he meant sources in accordance with WP:SOURCE, which is a big difference.
Short introductory to the issue:
We cannot use various personal blogs and different salesman/breeders websites as relevant if they do not cite where they found the information. There are a bunch of cut-copy-paste websites that use Wikipedia as its only source.
Here is a rare example of interpretation of the Wikipedia article on the Maltese by an outside user:
No matter how much of such personal/salesman websites could be collected we cannot deem those reliable simply on the basis of statistics.
There are currently a lot of pages on this topic (Maltese (dog)) that cut-copy-paste the text from Wikipedia word by word.
Pietru il-Boqli refused to talk about the content and continued to vandalise, denied Greek and Roman sources, laughs at the very mention of Mljet and has very abusive approach towards other editors of this article.
Imbris ( talk) 02:10, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
Hopefully the conflict over this article (about a fluffy little white dog, btw) will finally be resolved. the roof of this court is too high to be yours ( talk) 00:47, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
I simply object to pushing the Yugoslav POV as though such a thing were acceptable. As you can see (have you re-read the article?) many of your suggestions have been incorporated. The wheat has been separated from the chaff. the roof of this court is too high to be yours ( talk) 01:28, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Maltese dog/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.
Are you people crazy - you never hit a dog.
Your comments:Many local counties recommend physical discipline to prevent yapping, such as sharp hits to the back of the head or foot twisting when the animal barks - should be taken out of this article. This is illegal in our state. Why is the page locked? |
Last edited at 17:13, 3 February 2009 (UTC). Substituted at 21:19, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 |
The history section starts with an apparently spurious claim about the Latin name of the breed. The source cited makes no mention of canis melitaeus. Besides, canis melitaeus appears in very different connection in some other sources. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sjlain ( talk • contribs) 17:43, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
Hello everyone, I have removed the image "Maltese dog behavior" from the article because it wasn't descriptive enough to show the actual "behavioral traits" of the dog breed. Please add a good image in the place of the old one. Thank you, Dinan Blueje ( talk) 01:08, 31 August 2019 (UTC)
Provocation, irrelevant to improvement of this article |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Template:Infobox dog breed has a parameter for "patronage", and explains its meaning as:
We can sort-of conclude from this that when a dog breed's specific country of origin is not known, then its "patronage" is the place where the breed was developed. Because the Maltese originated in the Central Mediterranean Area, and was developed into the breed we love today in Italy, its patronage is Italy. I'm still not sure why "Maltese" should be translated into Italian on an English Wikipedia article? Has there been a consensus reached about this someplace? Magnolia677 ( talk) 21:04, 18 January 2020 (UTC)
as far as a new consensus is reached the previous consensual version is kept, or at least this is the way things work in Wikipedia, i.e. when an edit (in this case the removal) is challenged the previous version will be kept until a new consensus is reached in a discussion... I hoped that "Magnolia677" would leave his personal feelings and interests out of this issues and give the example as expected from his older position, but I was totally wrong, I overestimated his intellectual honesty and personal dignity, my bad. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.64.182.255 ( talk) 08:00, 19 January 2020 (UTC)
151.64.164.170 has approached a few of us wanting to know "Please tell us your opinion about the unmotivated removal of the Italian pronunciation which has been in the age for years and provided further information to the readers until it was removed without consensus".
I concur with editor Justlettersandnumbers - your personal views regarding other editors is irrelevant. Material can be removed from Wikipedia under
WP:BOLD - Wikipedia is not a static undertaking that is set in concrete. In my opinion, the Italian pronunciation is irrelevant to the article - this is not Wiktionary nor a course in the lingua italiana - and I and others support its removal. It is now removed with consensus; QED.
William Harris
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We read in our article that "Linnaeus wrote in 1792 that these dogs were about the size of a squirrel". That's quite an achievement, considering that he died in 1778. I intend to remove that paragraph unless proper sources are provided, including the page number where Linnaeus posthumously made this observation (there is a work by Gmelin published in 1792 on the mammalia of Linnaeus, but it does not seem to contain this statement). I'm tempted to remove the Joe Fulda source altogether as patently unreliable. Thoughts? Justlettersandnumbers ( talk) 00:03, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
I'm opening this thread not to talk about users but precisaly about the matter written in the title: the Italian pronunciation of the name "Maltese". I'm asking everyone to read the explanations below and answer about this matter.
The page "Maltese (dog)" has been starting for years with the following words: "The Maltese (Italian: [malˈteːze])". The haead paragraph has been containing the pronunciation of the name in Italian for all this time, nobody has ever challenged its presence and so it was the stable consensual version. The reason there was the pronunciation in Italian is that, in this particular case (not in general), the word "Maltese" can be pronounced non only in English but also in Italian. "Maltese" is the Italian word indicating this particular dog breed. "Maltese", in this case, in English doesn't mean "from Malta", it derives from a Semitic word ("màlat") from the which also the name "Malta" and others derive ( Fédération Cynologique Internationale). More, the origin of the dog isn't "the island of Malta" but generically "the Central Mediterranean Sea area", which includes Malta and Italy. The patronage of the dog breed is Italian (FCI). It follows from what I've explained that this dog breed is linked to Italy, not to Malta, except for its name which coincides with the English adjective meaning "from Malta".
For those who don't know, in Wikipedia it's very common including in the head paragraph a foreign pronunciation when the word (or name) can be pronounced in a foreign language, in order to give the reader one more information, which is nothing bad at all. Al Pacino and De Niro are American actors, their surnames are normally and correctly pronounced in English, but next to the English pronunciation it's indicated also the Italian pronunciation ("(/pəˈtʃiːnoʊ/, Italian: [paˈtʃiːno])" "(/də ˈnɪəroʊ/, Italian: [de ˈniːro])"): better one more piece of information for the readers, who perhaps won't read and so it'll be useless, than one less, which perhaps would be searched and not found. The word "pasta" is commonly used in English (both British and American) and pronounced /ˈpæstə/ or /ˈpɑːstə/ (as written in the head paragraph of the article), but it's indicated also the Italian pronunciation [ˈpasta]: again, better one more piece of information than one less. And this is exactly the reason why the "Help:IPA/languageX" template exist, not just for Italian but for every language. Removing the Italian pronunciation from those pages would be couterproductive, it wouldn't be a useful edit and I frankly can't see how it could ever be, I hope that everyone concurs. The same goes for "Maltese", which is commonly pronounced as the English adjective meaning "from Malta" (/mɑlˈtiz/ or /mɒlˈtiːz/) but could be pronounced also in Italian, as it's an Italian dog breed. Same speech as for pasta.
I light of all this, do you think that the Italian pronunciation must be removed from the article or have you convinced yourself that removing it wouldn't be an improvement but a worsening? @ Justlettersandnumbers, Cavalryman, and William Harris: I'm addressing you in particular but also whoever wants to write down his/her opinion. I didn't mention the wrong way this whole thing has been dealt with, i.e. without respecting the rules of Wikipedia itself, but the only thing I'm interested in is giving you correct information about this matter and read your opinions. 151.64.186.73 ( talk) 10:22, 21 January 2020 (UTC)
What we definitely do not do is include, for example, the Italian and Japanese pronunciation for things pertaining to Afghanistan or Australia. And consideration of this incidentally brings to light some WP:NOR problems in the article (in summary: commingling landraces and breeds; commingling 9 historical breeds with one modern one; mistaking ancient folklore and ambiguous medieval claims for modern-researched history). While there's a bit of an Italian cultural-historical connection to Malta (today mostly a language-intelligibility one due to media broadcasts), there doesn't seem to be any such Italian connection to this dog breed (neither culturally nor genetically), which in a strict sense of breed definition post-dates Malta's independence from Italy [or part of what became Italy, the Kingdom of Sicily, in 1530, and which even then was House of Anjou territory and thus had stronger ties to France anyway). Since then, Malta was controlled by France and England/UK, until full independence in 1964 (or 1979, depending on definitions). Meanwhile, as a breed in the modern sense, the variety (or varieties, really – at least 9 of them, of unknown inter-relationship) appear to date to the 17th century at the earliest, developed from local landrace dogs, and was/were not formalized with breed standards (which do not all agree with each other) until the early-to-mid-20th c. The sourcing we have so far seems to indicate it is most closely related to dogs of Switzerland and the south of France – not Italy. While there are written records of dogs purportedly from the area, going back to at least the 4th c. BCE, there's no reason to consider them all a single breed, and some specific pre-modern sources of this type have been challenged as to their meaning (e.g. referring to Méléda, not Malta, and with English writers of the Early Modern period seeming to show a bias in their interpretation). Our article needs to be re-written to better reflect all this, focusing on the dog breed history (including relationships to mainland dogs) and standardization as can be established using reliable modern sources; and separately treating pre-modern dogs of Malta, the historical claims about those and their veracity, and what modern sources suggest about how those dogs may relate to the modern breed[s]. I've done similar "separate facts from folklore" and "distinguish between landraces and standardized breeds" edits at several other breed articles, e.g. Cyprus cat, which may serve as a good model.
PS (and this is a long ramble leading up to a Wikipedia essay; it's time I did another
WP:Common sense piece as a non-human followup to
WP:Race and ethnicity): There's a strong element of what I would call "the fallacy of the perpetual breed" at work here and in many other articles. Animal breeds are not fixed (within a human time-frame of reference) like sculptures or continents; they are an ongoing process and they change over time, more like gardens or political borders. It's just how genetics works. No breed extant right now will still exist in 200 years – except perhaps in name but very different form, like what's happened with the
Persian cat over less than a century; or perhaps in similar form due to forced artificial selection but as cross-breeds with very different genetics through admixture to "recover" traits lost in the original stock (cf. ). When researchers (on our site or off of it) note that a modern breed (of anything) – subject to highly controlled attempts to breed-true very specific traits to a published breed standard – is mostly white (or whatever), and they find a source from 137 CE claiming white dogs were seen in the same area, it's just patent nonsense to leap to the idea that they're the same dogs and represent a continual process of breed refinement of the same breed. It's anti-scientific
WP:FRINGE. And its very rare for us to have pre-modern evidence of strictly controlled selection. More often, common breeders selected from whatever healthy livestock was available within a few villages away, or at a major market in the nearest proper town. These were adapted to their environment – this is how landraces develop. A select few aristocrats with a lot of time on their hands had the wherewithal to be much more selective, but were concerned with results (e.g. breed Baron von Snuffleporp's unusually fast hounds to mine, so I get faster dogs for my hunts), not with the establishment and perpetuation of some kind of "subsubspecies" as a named breed with standards. That's an entirely modern preoccupation dating to the late Victoria era, and probably itself has a finite lifespan of another century or less. We know for a fact now how
genetic bottlenecks work, what
hybrid vigor is, and that long-sustained fairly close inbreeding (e.g. first- or second-cousin to cousin, over and over again) can cause more genetic damage than rare closer (e.g. sibling) inbreeding. Lots of overly-inbred formal breeds are due for extinction as their genomes degrade, and this is more true among dog breeds than any other sector. Meanwhile, new breeds are being established by crossbreeding to avoid such problems, and themselves will ultimately have a finite range of viable breeding within the same breed. Even livestock breeding is increasingly shifting to the devising of new crossbreeds and even interspecific hybrids, not rote maintenance of old bloodlines. It's interesting that the perpetual-breed fallacy also pertains to humans and also dates mostly to the same era and earlier:
eugenics first arose in the Victorian period, as did a lot of wacky and pseudo-anthropological ideas about "
race", though some of it goes back to the 15th century; that stuff commingled with a common belief in the "breeding" superiority of the upper class (despite obvious evidence to the contrary like porphyria, color-blindness, lantern-jaw, etc.), and even a very frequent practice among commoners of first- and second-cousin marriages to keep land and other inheritance in the same family; plus sweeping romantic notions about what we'd today call ethnicity, e.g. the
Celtic Twilight and
German Romanticism, grounded in false beliefs that, say, the Irish and the Nordic peoples represent untainted lines of human breeding and culture to ancient times, yadda yadda yadda. To bring this back to breeds: the genetics are simply going to adapt to local conditions and available genes to mix with, as with any life form. Various discrete elements of the genetic makeup (haplogroups) are going to remain stable over a long period of time, and are not strongly affected by shallow levels of crossbreeding nor overwhelmingly corrupted by a few inbreeding instances (like a few drops of soy sauce in a large pot of water), because the overall genetic pool is stable, as is the environment to which it is long-term adapted. Where you're going to get a distinct-breed effect is when focused artificial selection (controlled breeding) is applied rather consistently – like dumping an entire pint of soy sauce into the pot. But even then genetics are not magically undone; the same forces of adaptation, mutation, dominant and recessive inheritance, etc., are all still in operation and largely outside of breeders' control. It's not possible to maintain exactly the same breed over a long period time.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
01:20, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
IP, just call an WP:RfC and get formal consensus regarding your proposal. Atsme Talk 📧 17:54, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
Dogs are no respecter of national boundaries. Nor were dog fanciers. Breeds appeared and were reproduced (sometimes badly) all over the world.
This is not unlike the constant nattering about the national origins of
Tadeusz Kościuszko or
Nikola Tesla, which I find boring and unproductive. Who know for sure? Who can? And given that international boundaries and allegiances have shifted subtly and at time grossly, what are we taking about.
7&6=thirteen (
☎)
17:20, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Dcesaire.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 03:12, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
The article has had for some time a tag (This article's lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points). I worked in providing it with an introduction, so I guess the tag can go now. Also, the previous lead didn't make much sense: "Despite the name, it has no verified historic or scientific connection to the island of Malta": well, it has been claimed to come from the island of Malta since Strabo 2000 years ago, and has been reported through the centuries to have been bred there, so it does have a historic connection to the island - by the way the introduction was written, it seemed like the breed name was just a coincidental homonym and not actually the same word as the one meaning "relating to Malta", which is not the case. It would make more sense to have something more in line with [ Britannica], which states in its introduction that it is named for the island of Malta, where it may have originated. Dan Palraz ( talk)