Vicki Rosenzweig is a native New Yorker, and would-be polymath.
In practice, "dilettante" might be closer, but I'm curious about most things, know at least a little about many, and enjoy answering questions and explaining things, so Wikipedia is a congenial project.
I'm also a professional copyeditor and proofreader, and enjoy being someplace where I'm encouraged to insert the missing "the"s, fix the spelling, and tidy up the commas.
I do freelance work: contact me if you need non-Wiki editing, proofreading, or research. vr@redbird.org If you want me to look over something on the Wikipedia, just drop a note on my talk page.
My home page is http://www.panix.com/~vr
I've been dropping in stubs on things I think ought to be covered--I started the light pollution article because it was requested, and just did a few paragraphs on whales because it seemed like an odd omission: there was already an article on ambergris. The list below is in the order of writing, rather than any more useful organization.
- An article on the Statue of Liberty, another to-me-obvious omission, with quotes from the National Park Service page, and Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus." --VR
- A brief sketch for an entry on Long Island
- Ditto on oracles, especially Delphi
- Short article on Jack Ruby, replacing one-sentence stub that mentioned only his birth name
- Habeas corpus (probably too US-centric)
- Added Pisistratos, lost comic epic, and "Homer: who was she?" to page on Homer
- A couple of paragraphs about the Hudson River
- Put the article on Benjamin Franklin into actual sentences, and expanded it a little, but a lot more needs doing.
- Copyedited "Euskara" and redirected to Basque; the previous contributor had left a one-line link to (I think) the [Basque/Euskadi (http://eu.wikipedia.com)] wiki
- Basic article on hurricanes, taken largely from NOAA Web site; I rearranged, copyedited, and added some material on damage outside the US
- Stub on Tokyo, mostly population numbers and brief history
- Short article on okapi (I went to the zoo today)
- Article on Lascaux; more needed, either here or in a more general article on cave art and/or Neolithic culture
- Short article on red panda; a public-domain photo would be good
- Article on Louis Riel; based mostly on Web research
- Galago: I seem to have taken on a general small-primate project, but help would be welcome. At the moment, there's almost nothing but lists of taxa, and the two short articles I've written.
- Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11--both taken largely from NASA Website, but wikified
- Edited and expanded dodo tree article
- Once-through copyedit on Rome/foundation (author had requested help with English)
- Ljubljana, by request of the most-wanted list
- Quick-and-dirty bio of John Philip Sousa, based on NY Times obituary (when I came across an extremely stubby page while doing days of the year)
- Orrorin
- Stubs on Bay of Biscay (most wanted) and that new order of insects. 4/18/02
- American bison
- Garlic (another most-wanted stub)
- Lake Huron, ditto
- Lincoln Memorial
- Vladivostok, another from the most-wanted list
- Seneca Falls Convention (needs more info)
- Odessa, Ukraine
- Przewalski's horse (info from June 2002 Natural History; I'd been meaning to do this one for a while
- Thurgood Marshall (stubby, but filling a serious gap)
- Svalbard (per request on ";votes for rewrite")
- Bald eagle was just a stub; added some info I got from a falconer.
- Complete rewrite of rhea (bird)--the previous was from the 1911 encyclopedia, and after modernizing the language, I realized it had lots of irrelevant stuff, and not the information that should be there
- Samuel J. Tilden (stubby from most-wanted)
- rewrote/expanded anachronism (another 1911 thing)
- Firefly (a stub so far, will expand)
- Sahelanthropus tchadensis (a.k.a. Toumai, a new hominid skull)
- Boustrophedon (stub, just because)
- Ununhexium and ununoctium, for the moment almost identical because what we know so far is that the same team falsely announced having created both
- Phoronida -- This is fun, and I learned something.
- Stub on soybeans, another most-wanted
- Parkville, California (short entry on town where expected quake hasn't happened)
- San Andreas Fault, stub to hang Parkville entry on
- stub on Ellesmere Island (I should find a map and some more info)
- rebuilt the article on Victor Gollancz, to make an actual biography of an important publisher, rather than another hobbyhorse for Helga
- Coatimundi -- a little more than a stub, a photo would be good
- Botanical garden
- Breast cancer -- really a stub, maybe someone will see it in Recent changes and expand it
- Rewrote oat, without the Household Cyclopedia stuff.
- Coptic calendar, because I came across some info. To do: list of Coptic months.
- Yonkers, New York
- Inwood, Manhattan
- I took a break, then came back and played wikiroulette a bit.
- 5145 Pholus -- a two-sentence stub replacing an empty page someone had created
- Expansion and heavy copyedit of False positive
- Joshua tree (based on National Park Service web site) and edit of Joshua Tree National Park; added public domain images to both
- Washington Heights, prompted by my quick rewrite of Chelsea, Manhattan
- Seminole (tribe) after I found a link for the people that gave me a disambiguation page and discovered that this article was missing
- Big Rip, a cosmological hypothesis
- Red-winged blackbird
- Expanded Neanderthal, including anatomical evidence that they were a separate species
- Refactored Poet Laureate, moving material on US to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (and removing the h1 heads)
- Colophon (book)
- City Lights Bookstore
- Long Island Sound (a most-wanted)
- Poughkeepsie, New York
To Do:
- Rewrite New York City entry, with much more history
- Expand apple {... but which one? disambiguated}
- More on Mississippi/Atchafalaya/Corps of Engineers
- fill out Hudson River article
- Rose, if nobody gets there first (just noticed that it's a very brief stub)
- more on zoos, currently three sentences or so, from memory to replace stubbiest of stubs
- fill out Slender loris entry (just read a good magazine article on the subject)
- koala, currently a pathetic stub
- de-stubbify zebra
- see which other people entered by the contributor who has a thing for presidents of the continental congress did other more important things (see John Jay
- expand American bison: should cover role in Plains Indian culture, for one
- whooping crane[?]
- Mount Rainier
Oh, and when I get bored I wander through the Wikipedia semi-randomly, inserting verbs into topic sentences.
Note to self: got to July 6, noticed conflict with July 5 (both claimed as publication date for Newton's Principia); check 7/5 talk page, then go on to 7/7 if not answered.
May 24 list of names is C'n'P from
http://www.thisdaythatyear.com/May/people24.htm
through
December 21; it's going more slowly as I use the "pages that link to" feature to find items to enter, and occasionally fix things on the pages that link to. (This would be simpler if I'd started at Jan. 1 and not skipped anything.) Oh, and I don't care how big a fan you are, not every detail of Bob Dylan's career belongs under "events."
In case anyone is wondering, I'm operating on the theory that singers, writers, philosophers and scientists belong to the world, but politicians and soldiers should be identified by country. I'm unlikely to add people I've never heard of unless they have Wikipedia entries: if someone cared enough to describe a life, it's worth giving dates of birth or death. I won't remove the entry for an athlete or entertainer just because I haven't heard of them, though. My non-wiki sources are US-biased; non-US Wikipedians are especially encouraged to add more data.