Community mourns passing of Adrianne Wadewitz
The Wikimedia community has been shocked by the death of Adrianne Wadewitz on 8 April from injuries suffered during a rock-climbing fall on 28 March. Adrianne was a well-known and popular editor on the English Wikipedia, where she authored 36 featured articles and organized edit-a-thons in Los Angeles. She served on the board of the Wiki Education Foundation, and was a vocal public Wikipedia advocate on HASTAC, an online group that works with scholars in the humanities, arts, and sciences on innovative collaborations on new modes of learning and research in higher education.
Adrianne was born on 6 January 1977, and graduated from high school in North Platte, Nebraska, a railroad town of about 25,000 people. She attended college at Columbia University, a prestigious institution in the heart of New York City, and graduated in English with the honor of magna cum laude. After receiving a PhD in British literature from Indiana University, in 2013 she took up a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She had recently accepted a position at nearby Whittier College where she was recruited to help "develop their digital liberal arts program".
Adrianne took up rock climbing last summer, and she blogged about how it changed her:
| “ | For me, one of the most empowering outcomes of my year of climbing has been the new narrative I can tell about myself. I am no longer 'Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, and Wikipedian'. I am now 'Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedian, and rock climber'. This was brought home most vividly to me one day when I was climbing outdoors here in Los Angeles and people on the beach were marveling at those of us climbing. Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience—that radical switch and growth. It is an enormous goal and I would love to hear how others work at achieving it with their students. | ” |
A memorial service in Adrianne's honor will take place at Occidental College on 14 April, and in Indiana on 26 April.