L'Englepedia and Torowinder Mania

Just for a change, I've been busy all night on Wikipedia. Check out this excerpt from my watchlist:

16 September 2006

• (diff) (hist) . . m Round Rock Express‎; 01:41 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (update PCL championship)
• (diff) (hist) . . m Tucson Toros‎; 01:34 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (adding back several redlinked players with substantial MLB careers who made significant contributions to Toros.)
• (diff) (hist) . . Tucson Sidewinders‎; 00:48 . . 69.244.45.130 (Talk) (→Notable Players)
• (diff) (hist) . . m John Scalzi‎; 00:40 . . Alphachimp (Talk | contribs) (Reverted 1 edit by 67.23.128.161 (talk) to last revision (75900455) by Mavarin using VP)
• (diff) (hist) . . m Madeleine L'Engle‎; 00:27 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (→Important L'Engle characters - formatting)
• (diff) (hist) . . m Mel Blanc‎; 00:18 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (spelling, remove sales pitch)
• (diff) (hist) . . m Polly O'Keefe‎; 00:05 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (→Name - grammar)

15 September 2006

• (diff) (hist) . . User:Mavarin‎; 23:45 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (Polly O'Keefe)
• (diff) (hist) . . m Calvin O'Keefe‎; 21:59 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (correction)
• (diff) (hist) . . Meg Murry‎; 21:46 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (more info and organization, spelling)
• (diff) (hist) . . m My Summer Story‎; 20:58 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (every reference I've found says 1994 release, not 1988)
• (diff) (hist) . . m List of fictional islands‎; 20:29 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (→Named - Benne Seed Island)
• (diff) (hist) . . m A Wrinkle in Time‎; 18:54 . . Mavarin (Talk | contribs) (→Characters - bold)

As you can probably tell (or maybe not), most of it centered on two subjects: Madeleine L'Engle and Tucson baseball. I'll explain about both of them.

Madeleine L'Engle and the Murry-O'Keefes

As most of you probably know, Madeleine L'Engle my favorite writer. I even have an online bibliography devoted to her work, although I've never really finished it. L'Engle wrote the classic children's novel A Wrinkle in Time back in 1959-1960, which won the Newbery Medal for 1962. The reason for the delay between the writing and the award is that the book was rejected by 26 publishers before she met John Farrar of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who didn't expect the book to be a success but bought it anyway.

That's just one of the reasons why Madeleine L'Engle is a hero of mine. She went from terrible rejection to major success, all with the same book. She also happens to be an excellent writer, filling her work with of great characters - decent, intelligent, talented, flawed people, most of them misfits in one way or another, who consider deeper issues than who is dating whom. Her books are about people and ideas: science, religion, mysticism, history, psychology... it's all in there somewhere.

Madeleine L'Engle has written novels, short stories, autobiographies (The Crosswicks Jornals), poetry and essays for children, teens and adults, although the distinctions among these categories are often blurred. Her most famous books, though, are young adult novels about three families:the Murrys, the O'Keefes and the Austins. Meg Murry and Calvin O'Keefe of A Wrinkle in Time eventually get married and have seven kids, the eldest of which, Polly O'Keefe, goes on to have adventures of her own, with and without her brother Charles.

So anyway, yesterday some kid (I'm guessing a youngish high school student, based on the spelling and syntax) wrote a "stub" article on Wikipedia about Charles Wallace Murry, Meg's remarkable brother. It wasn't a great bit of writing, but it wasn't terrible, either. So I spent the evening cleaning it up and adding to it. Then today the same person started stubs for Meg Murry and Calvin O'Keefe, so tonight I cleaned those up a bit, too. A little defensively, I then wrote an article about Polly O'Keefe from scratch, before "Happy User" could get to her. There's a lot more to be done on all of these articles, but it's a start, and something I've wanted to do for a while, anyway.

Toro-riffic! (Sort Of)

Tonight in Round Rock, Texas, the Tucson Sidewinders won the Pacific Coast League Championship. I know this because I checked the Sidewinders' official page around midnight to see whether they'd done it. The Tucson Citizen, which regularly sents me email alerts if there's a big storm coming, a high-profile arrest or a player dropped from Lute Olson's Arizona Wildcats basketball team, has not seen fit to notify me that the former Tucson Toros came out on top this year in a league of 16 AAA baseball teams. The last time Tucson took the PCL championship, back in 1993, the Tucson Toros were up against only nine other teams. That was before the American Association merged with the Pacific Coast League. Sort of.

There is an article on the Citizen site now, though. I checked.

For the last month or so I've been pretty much the curator of the Sidewinders article on Wikipedia, researching, adding and rewrting the entry and then updating it as the season and postseason progressed. This is ironic, because I haven't been to a Sidewinders game since about 2003. The last time John and I went, we got bored and left early. They just weren't our beloved Toros of yesteryear. Even so, it would be a shame not to acknowledge their achievements in 2006, so I've done so, all of the basis of sketchy online newpaper articles and final scores of games. I even updated the stub article about the team the Sidewinders defeated.

Tonight, however, I wasn't the only one to touch the Sidewinders, Toros, and Hi Corbett Field articles. Someone expanded my list of notable Toros and Sidewinders who made the majors, added links to the players' individual articles, and copied the list from the Toros article into the Sidewinders one. This was all fine and dandy until this person, editing from an IP address instead of a Wikipedia account, removed the names of any players who don't currently have Wikipedia articles. Grr. Three of the four were my favorite Toros of all time! More to the point, they all played for years in the majors, and all were key players in the Toros (including a league MVP) when there were here. So I put them back in the Toros article.

Congratulations, Sidewinders! I didn't cheer you on, but despite myself I turned out to be a loyal fan after all --virtually.


Technorati Tags: Tucson Sidewinders, Baseball, Tucson, Madeleine L'Engle, Wikipedia