User:Vicki Rosenzweig

Bio and contact information
Please note: I'm not spending a lot of time on Wikipedia these days, for boring personal reasons. But if I am on the site and notice something that needs fixing, I'll do it.

These days, I'm a freelance nonfiction editor. I also have a lot of experience as a professional copyeditor and proofreader, and enjoyed Wikipedia in part because it's someplace where I'm encouraged to insert the missing "the"s, fix the spelling, and tidy up the commas. Vicki Rosenzweig (talk) 19:09, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Please, use my talk page for messages, not this userinfo page.

My home page is http://www.panix.com/~vr

Editing as civil disobedience
The U.S. government is claiming that it is illegal for any American to edit anything written by someone from one of several nations, including Iraq and Iran. I copyedited Yas-e-no earlier today, partly because it needed a once-over (basic polishing of English, the usual), and partly to make the point that that rule is oppressive, immoral, and will do nothing to harm the governments it is allegedly aimed at. Vicki Rosenzweig 00:24, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Fortunately, this rule has been retracted, because of pressure from working scientists and science organizations. Vicki Rosenzweig 13:24, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Some of the articles I've written
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.

This list is hopelessly out of date: consider it a historical artifact. Vicki Rosenzweig (talk) 19:46, 25 November 2007 (UTC)


 * 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. User:Tarquin seems to have picked this up after I dropped it.
 * 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
 * Inwood Hill Park
 * 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
 * Elaphurus davidianus (Pere David's deer); photos (taken for Wikipedia use) added 27 July 2003
 * placeholder for Agrep
 * Minamata disease (a requested article)
 * Musk ox -- rewrite and major expansion of a stub

Anti-Phonetic Alphabet
I became aware of your Anti-Phonetic Alphabet through the VfD discussions after I had created the Ghoti phonetic alphabet article. I'm sure mine will be deleted, but it is nice to know I'm not the only one with a weird sense of humor. --StanZegel 05:18, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

p.s. I'll trade you a pneumonia for your heir. And irrupt was great, but bdellium deserves a Samuel Johnson Award. Stan.

Drive-By hello
just cruising through and seeing who is still around and active here. :-) JAH aka exJHK