I’m not sure when I made my first edit in Wikipedia; it was before I had an account so it doesn’t show up in the list of contributions attributed to me. The first listed under my account name of Brooklinehistory was in 2010, but it was a few years later that I started being more active.
My earliest contributions were mostly small corrections. I created my first article from scratch in 2016. It was a biography of Frances Taylor, a music and film critic and a lyricist who wrote lyrics, set to music by Pete Seeger, about three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964.
I’ve made contributions over the years related to Brookline history, baseball, jazz, and other topics. I’ve added citations to articles identified via the Citation Hunt tool as needing citations. I’ve also added etymological information to several articles.
As a librarian at Boston University I helped develop and participated in workshops for faculty and others on incorporating Wikipedia editing in classroom assignments and learning.
Since retiring in June 2021, I’ve added three more biographies from scratch, including one that grew out of my etymological work and another that turned out, by coincidence, to have an etymology angle to it.
This page provides links to some of my Wikipedia work.
- Articles I Started from Scratch
- Frances Taylor (Music and film critic and lyricist)
- Richard Slater Jennings (Jazz journalist and artist, also known as Prophet)
- Frank J. Wilstach (Journalist, theatrical manager, and lexicographer)
- Selected Articles to Which I’ve Made Contributions (In chronological order; most recent first)
- Mabel Ridley (Added death date and information about her funeral)
- Representative town meeting (Corrected history of representative town meeting in Massachusetts)
- Single-stream recycling (Corrected early history in North America)
- Ariel (American automobile) (Added more to the history of the car)
- Kangaroo court (Added earlier occurrence of the term in 1841)
- Blowing a raspberry (Added earlier occurrences of the term “Bronx cheer”)
- Brehon B. Somervell (Added information about Somervell’s relations with unions and left-wing groups and with the WPA arts program in NYC)
- Victor F. Ridder (Added info on his service as head of NY Board of Social Welfare and NYC WPA)
- Dizzy Gillespie (Added details and citations for meeting with Arturo Sandoval)
- Bronx Community College (Added additional movies filmed on the campus)
- Irazú Volcano (Corrected date eruption began to before Kennedy’s arrival rather than the same day he arrived)
- Coolidge Corner (Added details about replacement of original tower on S.S. Pierce Building)
- Horatio Alger (Added citations for public librarians disapproving of Alger)
- ….see also list on Baseball and Etymology pages
- Full list of edits and other contributions
