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   Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Jun-2024 09:45:25 JST Jessamyn

   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.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bum_Farto

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 07:55:39 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     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.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Foerstel

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 07:55:40 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     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.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilar_Sans_Coover

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: repeated this.
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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 07:55:42 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     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.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Kirkland

     Bill repeated this.
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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 07:55:43 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     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.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birger_M%C3%B6rner

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 07:55:44 JST Jessamyn

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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!

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Motor_Car_Company

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 07:55:45 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     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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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 07:55:46 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     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.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayside_Restaurant

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 07:55:47 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     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.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Steele

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 07:55:48 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     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.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nunes_Carvalho

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 21-Oct-2024 07:55:49 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     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

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Clark_(singer)

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 08:33:39 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     A cool thing about early photographers is their selfies. Unlike a LOT of other people of the time, we know what they look like. C. L. Howe was a VT photographer. I went to see if there were other ones. I found M. M. Hazeltine, known for his Yosemite pix, and found a teeny image of him and his brother working a gold claim in CA in the 1850s. Checked with the library to make sure they weren't claiming copyright for their scan (they weren't) and in to Wikipedia it goes!

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Mason_Hazeltine

     Bill repeated this.
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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 08:33:40 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     At work today I saw a cabinet card of William Morris Hunt. Someone had left a sixteen-year-old comment on it that mentioned the name of the photographer, Caleb Lysander Howe, saying that he was well-known in Vermont.

     Checked Wikipedia, found nothing about him, rectified that. Found his selfie on the internet as well as some amusing ads for his studio from the 1880s.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caleb_Lysander_Howe

     Adrianna Tan repeated this.
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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 08:33:41 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     Sometimes people suggest articles to me "It's curious that this notable person has no page." I'll get articles to Stub/Start class; other people who want to get more into the details can flesh them out.

     It was hard to stop with Stephanie Mills' page because there's a lot out there. She was around the Bay Area during the formative years of the ecology movement and wrote about it. She's known for her valedictorian speech "The Future is a Cruel Hoax." Relatable.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Mills_(journalist)

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 08:33:42 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     Yankel Kalich was married to the well-known actress Molly Picon. They started out in Yiddish theater (her mostly acting, him mostly producing) and wound up being in Hollywood movies like Fiddler on the Roof. They lived in Mahopac New York in a home they called Chez Schmendrick and were together 55 years.

     Kalich and Picon toured Displaced Person camps after WWII "anywhere they could find an audience of survivors." I saw his picture in Flickr Commons, wanted to know more

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankel_Kalich

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 08:33:44 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     Charlotte Davies was known to me because someone said "Hey that's my grandmother!" in a comment on Flickr Commons and then I looked her up and... wow. I very much believe she was doing the best she could as a young mother in the early 1900s in a world that was (was?) exceptionally judgmental about how women presented themselves. After her high profile divorce/annulment she drops entirely out of public life for which I suspect she was grateful.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Davies

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 08:33:45 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     A champion English one-legged swimmer of the Victorian era? And we have photographs of him from... 1865?

     With appreciation for the National Archives UK, I helped turn their blog post about Charles Harold Moore into a brief Wikipedia article about a man whose life is mostly documented for the highs and lows with very little in-between.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Harold_Moore

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 08:33:46 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     Language Log asked why there was no Wikipedia article about badass bibliographer (you heard me) Julia Emily Johnsen. Well, now there is one.

     https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=66743

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Emily_Johnsen

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 08:33:47 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     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.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Follis

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Monday, 16-Dec-2024 08:48:01 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     Since the Emmy Awards have no authority control, I had to learn some esoteric table formatting in Wikipedia so that I could include references for both the four Emmy nominations for Megan Callahan and then the four for Megan Callahan-Shah (after she was married). She's a writer for Saturday Night Live and after seeing someone quietly removing a redlink to her name, I decided maybe to just write up a stub instead.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Callahan-Shah

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jan-2025 03:11:24 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @jessamyn thank you!

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jan-2025 03:11:25 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     Here's my wrap-up of 2024 #Wikipedia stuff I did.

     - uploaded 81 images to Wikimedia Commons
     - uploaded 15 images to Wikipedia (usually for obits, or logos)
     - wrote 33 articles
     - made 755 edits

     A decent year. It didn't feel like too much bored (or grumpy) editing and a lot more "Hey this neat thing should be in there"

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jan-2025 03:11:26 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     • Smithsonian Roulette

     I have discovered @SmithsonianRoulette and I am both excited and doomed. This article about an itinerant folk artist and farmer from New Hampshire grew out of seeing a piece of his artwork and noticing that his home was in Wikipedia but he was not. It's fun to learn about early New England and its quirky decorative arts and the people who try to preserve them. Here's Moses Eaton Jr. He did stencils of pineapples and fancy walls for fancy people.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Eaton_Jr.

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     Molly White (molly0xfff@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jan-2025 03:54:50 JST Molly White

     in reply to

     • Dan York

     @jessamyn @danyork TWL is amazing. Proquest is often a good source for newspapery stuff there too.

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     Dan York (danyork@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jan-2025 03:54:57 JST Dan York

     in reply to

     @jessamyn It’s just super-impressive to see how many pages you have created in the quest to fill in the blanks! That’s really awesome!

     I often will see that a page is missing and think “I should go add that one”… but then a quick search for reliable sources turns up *few*, and so I know it’s going to be harder… so I put it aside… and, well, I never get back to it. :-(

     So kudos to you for making all these pages happen!

     (I also like your threading of the msgs here on Mastodon.)

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jan-2025 03:54:57 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     • Dan York

     @danyork Do you use Wikipedia Library's resources at all? I've found my newspapers.com subscription can help a lot with filling in those blanks, that and searching full text at the Internet Archive (or Trove for Aussie stuff)

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     Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jan-2025 03:54:59 JST Jessamyn

     in reply to

     • Dan York
     • Smithsonian Roulette

     @danyork Thanks. A lot of my work there was inspired by... my other work. Basically I'd see a photo that was new on Flickr Commons and then I'd be like "Oh hey who is that?" and go from there. Recently following @SmithsonianRoulette has been the same kind of thing.

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     Dan York (danyork@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jan-2025 03:55:00 JST Dan York

     in reply to

     @jessamyn That’s awesome! Congrats!

     (My year in Wikipedia was MUCH less with only 272 edits in the entire year… time to change that in 2025!)