Optional: Here is all the shit that we didn't get around to covering the last few months.
From Ghmyrtle
Talk:Tom Springfield#Death
From Ghmyrtle, in August 2022:
- Off-Wiki, I have received firm confirmation - accompanied by a copy of his death certificate - that Tom Springfield died in London on 27 July 2022. We are currently awaiting reliable published sources before updating our article. Ghmyrtle (talk) 12:40, 17 August 2022 (UTC) PS: The article has now been updated, using the official Facebook fan page for Dusty Springfield as the source. I know from personal contact that the person running that site has been in contact with Tom Springfield's solicitor and has seen the death certificate, so personally I'm content for that to remain, though other editors might prefer to wait for a more formal confirmation.[reply]
- PPS: As clarification, it was this anonymous edit to his Wikipedia page on 16 August that was the first public acknowledgement of Springfield's death three weeks earlier. (It was reverted as unsourced, before being reinstated when we had reliable sources.) It transpired that it had been made by Springfield's solicitor, who had also informed the coroner of his death. Once the solicitor had confirmed that information by email to me, I alerted custodians of Dusty Springfield fan pages on Facebook, who knew nothing of his death. As a result, over the next few days the news leaked out into the public arena, and now - belatedly - into newspaper reports and obituaries. If it hadn't been for that anonymous IP edit here, and the ability to identify where it came from, we may never have known of his death - he was clearly a very private man.
We can do something with this, right?
From Hunter Kahn
- A few years ago I drastically expanded the Wikipedia article about the baseball player Stephen Vogt, working it up to GA status. This year, Stephen Vogt retired, which brought some additional attention to the page.
- I mentioned on my personal Twitter page that I was the primary author of Vogt's Wikipedia page, which led to me getting contacted by Ben Lindbergh, senior editor at The Ringer and co-host of a baseball podcast called Effectively Wild. It turns out Ben had done a little research about the longest baseball player articles on Wikipedia, and he had been particularly intrigued by why the page about Stephen Vogt was as detailed as those of players like Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.
- So over the course of an hour-long conversation via Twitter DM messages, he started asking me questions about why I edited that page, how I went about it, what other pages I've edited, etc. He said he might discuss it on his podcast, and I figured he might give it a 30-second shoutout or something, but he ended up dedicated a full THIRTEEN MINUTES of his podcast to the discussion and to Stephen Vogt's Wikipedia page.
- Not sure if this is something that would interest the Signpost, but if you want to listen, the Vogt/Wikipedia discussion can be found at the 17:40 mark of the podcast episode, which was just released today (October 7). The official episode description states: "Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley... share a few words from the diligent author of the retiring Stephen Vogt's
exhausting exhaustive Wikipedia page." LOL
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