Wikimedian passes away
Cynthia Ashley-Nelson, who edited as "Cindamuse" on the Wikimedia projects, passed away in her sleep at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin on 11 April.
Cynthia's death was first relayed to the movement by the Affiliations Committee, on which she served as vice-chair for one day before her death. Originally an English Wikipedian, having registered an account on the site in 2007, she wrote two good articles on the site, including one on her distant relative Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury and the 2010 book on the first US president, Washington: A Life, and made about 33,500 edits. She was nominated for administrator by Pedro in December 2013 and passed with 97 votes in support.
In the Wikimedia movement, Cynthia was appointed to the Affiliations Committee, which advises the Wikimedia Foundation on the approval of new affiliates, at the beginning of 2014. She participated with Wikipedia's Volunteer Response Team, which uses an open-source ticket request system (OTRS) to respond to email inquiries, and co-moderated the Wikimedia movement's gender gap mailing list.
In real life, Cynthia lived in the United States. Born in California, she worked in Washington as the founder and executive director of Catalyst Resource Network, whose Facebook page describes it as an organization that fights one of the remaining areas of slavery: sex trafficking and exploitation. "We're basically a modern day Underground Railroad."
Tributes to Cynthia came in from around the movement. The outgoing and incoming chairs of the Affiliations Committee wrote in a joint statement that "In the short time since January that Cindy has been with us in the Affiliations Committee, we have come to value her thoughts, passion and refreshing ideas. She was working very enthusiastically with us, and we are all saddened that we won’t have the chance to learn from all of her ideas, insights and experiences. The months we shared proved her to be a very valuable and engaged member of the committee".
Foundation board member María Sefidari wrote in the Wikimedia blog: "We would send each other long emails about movement roles and how to move forward with the movement. And as it usually happens, conversations turned from the more formal to the informal, eventually including little snippets of our every day lives, the good things that happened to us and the not so good. When we met for the first time face to face several days ago, we gave each other a big hug. ... I think our last interaction was about getting together at some moment during the conference to just hang out and talk. She had a great smile."
Tributes are being left on her English Wikipedia talk page.