New Year new #Wikipedia list.
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Saw a close-up magic performance (on YouTube) by Markobi who took home an award from the World Championship of Magic (held only every three years) and was surprised that he had no Wikipedia page. I made a small one. Very little info on this young magician.
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Found this smiley photo of Rose Koller on Flickr Commons and left it in a tab for later. Today I dug in to try to figure out more about her. Not that much info for someone who doesn't read German. I also have a nagging suspicion she may have gotten married and changed her name and perhaps did a lot of work under that name. I did notice that she seems to have been a VERY early forensic facial reconstructer, so I added her name to that page too.
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A pal noted that it was weird that 41st VT governor Nelson Fisk had a Wikipedia page while his wife Elizabeth Hubbell Fisk, who had revitalized a kind of woven textile art, did not.
I wrote one. I will note that some of this is "Bored rich white lady finds something to do and Vermont likes to write about their own" but some was definitely not and I enjoyed learning about her and scaring up old sources from the Wayback Machine and Newspapers.com #weaving #textiles
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Was watching one of my goofy British cop shows last night and noticed one of the actors seemed to have his shit totally together. Looked him up, did not find much info in the usual places despite him having been a Shakespearean actor since the 1970s.
Threw together a Wikipedia article (simple to get started, someone with a better theater background please make it better) and then found 14 other pages that mentioned him. Meet Leo Wringer. Played Marvin Gaye on stage.
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Was reading a talk about the 200th anniversary of Braille (thanks @JonathanMosen) and he noted the passing of David Holladay who wrote early Braille translator software to help support his wife, Caryn Navy, a blind math professor when they were students at MIT.
He had a newsletter (about accessible computing) which was also published on cassette.
He continued to write and work on Braille software for his entire life, now with Wikipedia page!
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My usual rule of thumb is only articles about under-represented folks on Wikipedia but I made an exception for Bill Harris without actually knowing he was a gay journalist so Happy Pride Month and please enjoy the wide array of things this man did in his journalism career.
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This guy's name is Bum Farto and the categories on his Wikipedia article are: 1919 births, Missing people, People declared dead in absentia, 20th-century American criminals, and Firefighters. I don't think I have anything more to add except amazement no one had written this article before.
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A photo of a woman from the LoCs's Flickr and me like "Who is THAT person?" Helen Clark was a prolific early recording artist, a contralto who managed to be popular both on old pre-microphone recordings as well as newer electronic ones. Bless these odd reference works like "Pseudonyms on American records, 1892-1942: a guide to false names and label errors" and "A Listing of American & British Two and Four-Minute Cylinders, 1907-1922" So little about her online otherwise
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Random crushes on people in Wikimedia Commons. David Nunes Carvalho was the son of a man who might be the first Jewish photographer in the US. He followed in his dad's footsteps for a time and then became (if you believe the news stories) one of the world's most accomplished handwriting, ink and paper experts, testifying in over 2000 trials including a few you've heard of. His daughter published a biography of him after his death which promoted her father's legacy.
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Will and Harper began its limited theatrical release this week and starts on Netflix on the 27th. I know all about Will Ferrell but was interested in knowing more about Harper Steele (you know, the other star and the entire reason there was even a movie) but there was no Wikipedia article.
Harper Steele is an Emmy-award winning writer who worked at SNL for thirteen years. She seems neat, and now she has a Wikipedia article which I hope others improve on.
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I've been eating at the Wayside Restaurant since before it was 100 years old (over 25 years ago) and you'd think a place this embedded in Vermont history would have had a Wikipedia page but it did not.
Bonus: got to use my own parker house rolls photo in the article.
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I've joined the Twenty Year Society of Wikipedia editors. I've written 418 articles, I've served on the Wikimedia Foundation Board, fixed typos, added citations, added photos of people who should have them, and added a lot of fair use and public domain content there and on Wikimedia Commons.
My favorite things I've done are adding photos of BIPOC librarians, creating the stadium organist and state library association templates, and defending articles about trans folks from pronoun vandalism.
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My friend runs the town's historical society. People regularly give him boxes of crap to deal with. One of the things in one of the boxes was a stock certificate for the Murray Motor Car Company in Boston MA. He'd never heard of it, couldn't find anything online. I'd never heard of it, but, you know me....
A few hours later and a LOT of scraping through Newspapers.com and the Internet Archive's old books and car magazines, presto! The cybertrucks of their day!
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I should not write more Wikipedia pages about terrible white men but sometimes I can't help myself. Someone should tell people that they were here and they were... kind of awful. Huge props to Trove (Australia) which has a "cite this source on Wikipedia" which helped a great deal.
Look at this guy's face! Look at this shit he was talking WHILE AT WORK AS CONSUL TO AUSTRALIA. I didn't even get into all the looting.
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Wallace Kirkland was a social worker turned award-winning Life Magazine photographer. If you're in the US, he's taken some photos you've definitely seen. I saw a picture of him... taking a picture, by famous Australian photographer Max Dupain and went to Wikipedia to learn more and... nothing! I was fortunate that there were a number of terrific archives which had done the work so that I could learn more about him, and now the world can too.
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Robert Coover died recently. His obits mention his wife, an accomplished textile artist who does a weird and cool kind of needlepoint. Her life is really interesting and I decided to write a bit of it up for Wikipedia.
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Herbert Foerstel was a science librarian at the University of MD. The FBI came to his library on a fishing expedition looking for patron records of people with "Eastern European or Russian-sounding names." He was not ok with this. Through FOIA requests, he was able to learn about the FBI's "Library Awareness Program" which he eventually wrote a book about, along with many other books about patron privacy and book banning in the US. This was a fun article to write.
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Found an image of Dorothy Follis in the Library of Congress' Flickr uploads. Was wondering who she was. Apparently a big deal of a singer and actress (and good at getting into the papers). Had a twelve-year career, was in a few Broadway shows and sang with the Chicago Grand Opera Company and then toured with her own company. Noted for her beauty and her talent, she got married to a newspaper man and died just over a year later at the age of 31.
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Language Log asked why there was no Wikipedia article about badass bibliographer (you heard me) Julia Emily Johnsen. Well, now there is one.
