User:Vicki Rosenzweig

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Vicki Rosenzweig (talk | contribs) at 12:32, 15 July 2002 (+ununhexium,ununoctium). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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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.

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.

  • 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] 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--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

To Do:

  • Rewrite New York City entry, with much more history
  • Expand apple
  • 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
  • finish editing the day-of-the-year entries for format
  • Voyager 2 and more on Voyager 1
  • 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
  • Quebec needs a lot of work

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.

Thanks Vicky, that's exactly how I wanted it. Andrew Vanderesch. One more question about etiquette. Is it OK if I use your page to communicate with you or is there another way which is less disturbing but that assures me the other Wikepedian gets the message all the same?

This is fine, or I have a "user talk" page you can use. ==VR

Vicky, no criticism intended, but the term "Nearctic" has a new definition in ecology. Read the Ecoregions entry and follow the link to the new WWF and NG map of the terrestrial ecoregions of the world, and youll see that the definition that was there before was accurate, and your new one is using an old definition (which may still be in use for other purposes - ???)

I suppose someone could have come up with a more confusing term for that. Okay, change it back. Who are you, by the way? (And there's no y in my name.)

--- Sorry Vicki. Now I have to figure out how to change it back. But if you have an interest in this stuff you might want to add all the entries for all the ecoregions, since it's good party chatter for parties in Manhattan etc.

-)

I'm just the voice writing the strange Ecoregional_Democracy link - the movement with so many names I had to make one up just to be broad enough... hey Shakespeare made up 1/4 of the words he used, let alone phrases.... sigh...

Changing things back is easy: you can use the "history" feature and save the version before the changes were made. But please see Wikipedia is not a dictionary: a useful article on Nearctic would describe this ecological region--biomes, species, why it's defined as a region, when it was named and defined, probably several things I haven't thought of.
And my "to do" list is quite long enough, thanks. (I'm leaving you a note on my page because I have no other way to reach you. If I didn't have a login either, how would we talk?) Vicki Rosenzweig

Are you sure about Timberline? I thought the timberline was the upper (in latitude or altitude) boundary of the forest.

Timberline is used locally in the Rocky Mountains, but treeline is used in the Arctic. Fred Bauder

That's not what I was asking. Let me try again: is the treeline/timberline a *region*? I thought it was the boundary, a line in the geometrical sense (with no thickness). Vicki Rosenzweig

Oh, yes, it is a region with a distinctive ecology and is rather broad. Readily distinquished from the Alpine zone below and the Tundra zone above. Fred Bauder

Hi, Vicki, Yes Tucson, Arizona is an outrageously short stub. But a big city that someone will eventually write about. Mostly I just noticed a "Tucson," a "Tucson,Arizona," and of course in my Tohono O'odham I had used "Tucson, Arizona. so I put in a stub and got all the different Tucsons to link to that page., Fred

Not only do these entries not make the Wikipedia look good--imagine doing a Web search on "Tucson, Arizona," finding a pointer to an encyclopedia, then that half-sentence--they probably make it less likely that someone will write about these places. One of the ways people decide what to write about is by looking at the "most wanted". A place with lots of links, and no stub, becomes a most-wanted, and then someone like me does a little research and writes it. A city with a page reading "A city in northern Arizona" won't turn up there, and can remain a stub indefinitely. Vicki Rosenzweig, Sunday, June 16, 2002

Thanks for editing "Gdansk", Vicki. Unfortunately, HJ just put back her old version. I decided to restore yours instead of mine, due to punctuation etc. Space CadetMon,06/24/02

Hi Vicki,

thanks for trying. This is "your restored version of Mon,06/24/02" Gdansk. I have tried many times, but am about to realize, that it is futile. Oh, well !! H. Jonat

Forgive me if this is an improper place to put a reply, I was unable to find documentation for the Talk feature of Wikipedia. Thanks for the heads-up on "Wikipedia is not a dictionary", I can see the logic in that decision. I'll try to create more expansive entries in the future. juwiley

It's cool. The User talk is also cool--and I'm going to move this there in a day or two. But user pages are for working on the 'pedia, so notes here are fine. Vicki Rosenzweig

Hi Vickie, Thank you for suggesting the off-homepage. My personal page is posted , but I do not have access to it in the sence that I can add or change it much. I will see what I can come up with. Thanks again. H. Jonat.

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