Miskatonic University PressA few days ago a friend mentioned she’d picked up a book by Elisabeth Russell Taylor, based on her introduction to a book by Elizabeth Taylor (not that Elizabeth Taylor). (I’ve been reading some Elizabeth Taylor recently myself, and would recommend Angel (1957) and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971).)
I had a vague memory of seeing a book by Elisabeth Russell Taylor once, and was curious to know more about her. I did what I always do: I looked her up on Wikipedia.
She had no Wikipedia entry. So I created one: Elisabeth Russell Taylor. I spent about an hour on it late one night, pasting in a partial bibliography, setting up the infobox, putting in a reference to her Guardian obit but not citing it, and adding some categories and the authority control template. (It looked like this when I was done.)
I woke up the next morning to several notifications from Wikipedia. Someone had unpublished the page and made it a draft, saying it wasn’t ready for publication! Someone else undid that and made it live again! I thanked him. That night I made some edits, added some citations, and it’s a decent stub now. The difficulty in getting it started was much less than I’d feared: see the article creation and deletion section of Wikipedia’s entry on gender bias on Wikipedia for more.
Here’s an odd thing: there used to be a page about Elisabeth Russell Taylor, but it was deleted when everything created by a sock puppet account was wiped. The history log for the page shows that it was created and reviewed in January 2021 and then deleted in November. I can’t figure out how to get to the previous version, but there’s this strange archived version on another site. It was a decent entry! I don’t know about the account that made it, but this particular entry was a solid beginning and was an unfortunate side effect of the mass deletion. I referred to it when making my own updates.
Soon I’ll read one of her novels.