Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians

This is both a memorial and listing of Wikipedians who have died.

Purpose of this list

The purpose of this list is to provide a reminder of those who have passed on and to remember the contributions these editors made to the success of Wikipedia.

Please do not add people to this list who were never an integral part of the community. People in this list should have made at least several hundred edits or be known for substantial contributions to certain articles. Do not add people unless you can supply verifiable information that they are deceased.

Deceased Wikipedians

Gérald Anfossi (Nataraja)

Gérald Anfossi (Nataraja)

Gérald Anfossi, username Nataraja, died of cancer on March 17, 2006. Gérald was an administrator and one of the most active editors on the French Wikipedia, where he contributed to numerous articles on South Asia. He also contributed many of his personal images to commons (such as Image:Sanchi2.jpg, which is featured on the History of India page, among others) and coordinated interwiki work between the English and French Wikipedias. He made 31781 contributions to 11 projects, the vast majority to French Wikipedia. His funeral was in his beloved adopted land of India.

Xavier Bonnafous (Xulin)

Xavier Bonnafous (Xulin)

Xavier Bonnafous, a Wikipedian who primarily edited in the French Wikipedia under the username Xulin, died on May 7, 2006 during a hang gliding accident, according to online reports. Xavier also edited the English Wikipedia using Xulin, although this account was mainly used for interwiki work. On his French user page, Xavier said he was interested in free software and ecology issues. A memorial for Xavier has been established on the French Wikipedia. He made 866 contributions to three projects, the vast majority to French Wikipedia.

Robert Braunwart (Rbraunwa)

Robert Braunwart (Rbraunwa)

Robert Braunwart (Rbraunwa) was born in Richland Washington in 1948 and grew up in Moses Lake. He lived for many years in Oaxaca, México and Los Angeles, California. He attended Reed College as a National Merit Scholar before transferring to the University of Washington. During his life, Robert worked as an administrative assistant, editor, small business owner, and online math tutor, but his major interests and activities centered on political activities and a variety of personal projects, ranging from co-founding the Professional Football Researchers Association to contributing 11910 edits and hundreds of articles to English Wikipedia, primarily on the viceroys of New Spain and 1128 edits to ten other Wikimedia projects. Of these new articles, at least 15 were honored as Did you know selections. Robert died on October 14, 2007 from melanoma.

Patrick Devlin (Padraig)

Patrick Devlin (Padraig) was a well-known and popular editor of Irish articles on Wikipedia. A 48 year old father of three with three grandchildren originally from Strabane, Northern Ireland, he passed away on May 17, 2008 in a hospice in Hackney, London after a six-year battle with cancer. "Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis."

Pete Fenelon (Pete Fenelon)

Pete Fenelon (username Pete Fenelon) made his first edit on December 21, 2005 and contributed more than 1,500 edits to the English Wikipedia over the next three years. He mostly edited on the subject of auto racing, local geography and science fiction. According to a message left on the AtlasF1 Bulletin Board, he died in October 2008 at the age of forty. A website and memorial fund have been set up in his memory.

Uladzimir Katkouski (Rydel)

Uladzimir Katkouski, a well-known and award-winning Belarusian blogger, editor of several Belarusian websites and activist for the usage of the Belarusian language on the Internet. He made 1343 contributions to the English Wikipedia and 1286 contributions to nine other Wikimedia projects. Katkouski mostly edited articles about his country and his language. He was hit by a fire truck in 2006 and, after being in a coma for about a year, he passed away on May 25, 2007.

Scott Laws (Dalf)

Scott Laws, username Dalf, died of colon cancer on September 14, 2007. He had been a long-term Wikipedian, making 3332 contributions to English Wikipedia since April 8, 2005 and 23 contributions to five other Wikimedia projects. Among the articles he edited were Imperial Japanese Navy, Horcrux, and Nuclear power. Laws was an alumnus of Hickman High School and the University of Missouri and worked for Microsoft's Hotmail in Silicon Valley until he was diagnosed with cancer in 2004. He was 30 years old.

Neil Morris (Neilm)

Neil Morris lived in Southsea, England, where he worked as a Chartered Engineer and for a computer company. Neil was also an inventor, holding a patent to a drop detection device. Among the articles edited by Neil were Parallel SCSI, SCSI Enclosure Services, and Enclosure Services Interface. He passed away on September 17, 2006, according to a notice left on his user page. Further information on his life would be appreciated.

Bernard Norbert (Treanna)

Bernard Norbert (Treanna)

Bernard Norbert, also known by his username Treanna, passed away on September 18, 2005. With over 30,000 edits, of which about 25,000 were in article space in just two years, Treanna was the most active contributor of the French Wikipedia. Aged 31, he had just started to contribute again after a coronary incident which had landed him in the hospital in July. The French-speaking community was informed of his condition thanks to one of his sisters, Anne, by email and on this page, throughout the summer. Treanna will be remembered as a great contributor in all domains, but especially in the domains of history, archeology, genealogy, palaeography and related topics. The French Wikipedia community has decided to honour him in working together on a WikiReader about the Middle Ages, a part of Wikipédia to which he has greatly contributed. According to Myriam, his youngest sister, the WikiReader could "help us, his family, to better realise the extent of what he knew and loved to share... the knowledge he did not have time to teach us". Many contributors expressed their condolences to the family here.

Clayton Olney (Cumulus Clouds)

Clayton Olney, username Cumulus Clouds, died on December 22, 2008. Clayton was an enthusiast and an active editor on the English Wikipedia, where he contributed to numerous articles on American politics, sociology, boats, and high schools. He also submitted many of his personal images to Commons, including pictures of his high school, Eastlake High School. Clayton was an avid counter-vandal, and had amassed several thousand edits on the English Wikipedia and Commons.

Bill O'Ryan (Oryanw)

Bill O'Ryan (Oryanw) in 1988

William "Bill" O'Ryan died on February 12, 2008, of complications from rheumatoid arthritis, which had afflicted him for several years. He was born in New York on March 16, 1944, and spent his childhood in the United States, Turkey, and the Netherlands. This multilingual environment led him to proficiency in several languages, including Dutch and Turkish; the US Army trained him in Russian before sending him to Ethiopia, where he taught himself Tigrinya and Ge'ez. As well, while in Ethiopia he met and married his first wife Askalu. Later in life, he and his second wife Fereshteh Taremi taught Esperanto for the Esperanto Society at Arizona State University. An active participant in the Esperanto Wikipedia, Bill amassed over 4,000 edits, spending many hours translating articles into Esperanto and serving as an administrator. He is survived by his siblings Rick and Josephine, his sons Micky, Patrik and Denny, his daughters Zowdi and Jemila, and his grandchildren Joshua, JJ, Izzy, Claudia, Leo, Emmanuel, and Rafael.

Báder Imre (Bader; Baderimre)

Dr. Báder Imre passed away in November 2007. He was a retired associate professor of the University of Miskolc where he worked for nearly 40 years. He registered on Wikipedia on his 62nd birthday, March 1, 2007 and contributed several articles and images on physics and chemistry, including a featured article about surface tension. He was buried in the St. Anna cemetery in Miskolc on December 3, 2007. The community was informed of his death by his colleague Szalax. Several Wikipedians expressed their condolences here.

Maciej Ostrowski (MOstrows)

Maciej Ostrowski passed away on September 24, 2007 . Since January 23, 2006, he was an active contributor to the Polish Wikipedia. Due to his interests in theoretical organic chemistry, he wrote a few articles related to this subject. According to his own userpage, he was interested in tumours, and enjoyed travelling – especially by train. He used to translate articles from the English Wikipedia and liked the Czech language as well.

Although he has been very sick and weakened for few years before his death, he used to describe his sickness on his blog (Polish).

Tron Øgrim (Tronogrim)

Tron Øgrim (Tronogrim)

Jimmy Wales and Tron Øgrim. Bergen, Norway, May 2006

Tron Øgrim, a Norwegian Wikimedian, journalist, and author, died on May 23, 2007. He was 59 years old. Tron was one of the most influential people in Norway's Marxist-Leninist movement in the sixties and seventies. He was one of the founders of the Workers' Communist Party, a party which strongly advocated the Chinese branch of communism. Tron was also central in the founding of the newspaper Klassekampen and the publishing house Oktober. Tron became a journalist after leaving politics in the eighties, having a technology column in the Norwegian edition of PC World. Tron became a Wikipedian in December 2005, when libelous statements about a colleague appeared in a Norwegian (bokmål) Wikipedia article. Tron continued as a Wikipedia editor after the issue was resolved, writing about constructed languages through most of 2006. In the fall of 2006, his focus changed to Nepal generally and the history of communism in Nepal specifically (see Nepals kommunistiske parti (maoistisk) for an example of one of his articles.) Tron was known in the Norwegian wikicommunity for writing very long articles about somewhat obscure topics. Tron also cared much about smaller wikis and their progress. He was routinely posting messages about milestones at the Norwegian Village Pump, as well as participating on the Wikimedia News announcements page. Tron was extremely important for the Norwegian wiki movement, and he was often interviewed by the press about Wikipedia. He gave a lecture about Wikipedia when Wikipedia's founder Jimbo Wales visited Norway in May 2006. More info on him is available at Tron Øgrim and Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-05-28/Wikipedian_death.

Oded Schramm (OdedSchramm)

Oded Schramm

Oded Schramm, a notable professional mathematician who also contributed to mathematical articles on Wikipedia as OdedSchramm, died of a fall while climbing Guye Peak on September 1, 2008, aged 46. Schramm was born in Jerusalem, Israel, in December 1961, educated at Princeton University, and worked at the University of California, San Diego and the Weizmann Institute before moving to Microsoft Research in Seattle in 1999. He was well known in mathematics circles and won numerous international prizes for his work in conformal geometry and probability, and particularly for the stochastic Loewner evolution. On Wikipedia, he made major contributions to articles including coupling from the past, quasiconformal mapping, and Dilworth's theorem. He is survived by his wife Avivit and two children Tslil and Pele.

David Shear (David Shear)

David Shear (David Shear) received a B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1959 with majors in math and biology and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Brandeis University in 1966. He worked in the biochemistry department at the University of Missouri, and at the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin (where his son and wife are also faculty members.) In 1972 he published a science fiction novel, Cloning. He joined Wikipedia in September 2005 and focused on articles related to mathematics and thermodynamics. David passed away on April 21, 2007.

Hume Smith (Kwantus)

Hume Smith (Kwantus)

Hume Cottnam Llewellyn Smith (username Kwantus) died suddenly July 21, 2005, at age 38 in the New Halifax Infirmary, QEII, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Born December 18, 1966 in Lunenburg, he attended Chester Elementary schools and was a graduate of Parkview Education Centre, Bridgewater. Hume held an honours degree in science and was the recipient of the Gold Medal for the highest academic standing in sciences and the Silver Medal for the second highest academic standing in his graduating class at Acadia University, Wolfville. He was a computer programmer and a member and assistant organist at Chester United Baptist Church and died of a massive heart attack within hours of completing a restoration project on his church's chime, which he had worked on for over a decade. He had over 2000 edits to the English Wikipedia and created such articles as Conway chained arrow and Single bullet theory. Hume is survived by his mother, Gail Ida Hume Smith, and maternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Hume, Chester. He is buried in Pinehill Cemetery, Chester, Nova Scotia.

Caroline Thompson (Caroline Thompson)

Caroline Thompson

Caroline Thompson, a Wikipedian who primarily edited articles relating to quantum mechanics, died on February 8, 2006, according to her family. The cause of death was cancer. Thompson, who had written papers on the subject while a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, had edited sporadically in the months leading up to her death, last editing on January 10, 2006. She also maintained a website on her theories regarding physics.

Stéphane Tendon (Stéphane Tendon)

Stéphane Tendon

Stéphane Tendon, a historian from Gland in Switzerland who edited on the French Wikipedia from January 2006, died on March 25 2008. Born in 1970 in Geneva, he received his BA in History from the University of Geneva in October 1996, and completed his doctorate at the University of Basel. He contributed to a number of articles related to history, political theory and Swiss geography, and ran the website helvete.ch, an open wiki concerning Swiss national identity.

Carli Ann Ward (CanadaGirl)

Carli Ann Ward, born 18 March 1982 in Saint John, New Brunswick, began editing in July 2005, starting with wikignome work and moving into vandal fighting. In November 2006, she noted "I was diagnosed with cervical cancer in August of 2006. It is expected to be terminal, and the doctors have told me I probably won't live past the summer of 2007," and noting that she would continue to update her website. She died on 15 December 2007 from clear cell adenocarcinoma. A tribute website has been created detailing her life.

Jeff Woloson (Jeffpw)

See also: User talk:Jeffpw/Memoriam

File:Joy.jpg

Jeffpw (left) with his husband, Isaac

Jeff Woloson was a nurse by profession (specializing in home health care and hospice care) and a dual citizen of the United States and Netherlands. He lived in Amsterdam but traveled extensively. He was a highly active member of the LGBT Wikiproject and a primary contributor to the articles on James Robert Baker (a featured article) and Gay icon. He passed away on August 7, 2008 just 6 weeks after the death of his husband, Isaac, whom he loved dearly.