Daniel,

You might have been aware that Adrianne was investing a lot of time and energy in organizing the NYC Wikiconference.
<http://wikiconferenceusa.org/wiki/Main_Page>

I also am helping plan this, and I presume you will be attending. Whatever happened was presented to us organizing the conference as minor and unexpected, as her partner sent a message that she would not be able to call in for a meeting. He said that she was in a coma the day before but was optimistic, and my interpretation at the time was that she had a serious injury from which she would recover with time. I am not sure what happened - so far as I know she was in good condition in the hospital for two days before passing on the third. She was an experienced climber who loved the sport. I understand that she fell thirty feet.

As you noted she produced a tremendous amount of excellent Wikipedia content. Just weeks earlier she had gotten a dream job which was encouraging her Wikipedia collaborations, and she was also deeply invested in Wikipedia outreach to schools.

Besides her outreach to women I feel a great loss from her no longer doing outreach to LGBT communities. As hard as it is to address the gender gap with women it is even more difficult to do so with minority genders, and Adrianne was a compassionate spokesperson for LGBT interests.

yours,



On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase@frontiernet.net> wrote:
Subject: [Gendergap] Blogger and Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz died whilerock-climbing

This is to inform you that one of the contributors to this list who
spent a lot of time working on the Gendergap issue and ways to solve
it, has died in a rock-climbing accident.
http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/blog/adrianne-wadewitz/

How truly sad.

While I did not work with her on any gendergap-related issues, I remember her well as a tenacious reviewer of DYK submissions, mine included. We didn't always agree, but I never doubted her integrity and commitment to the ideals of Wikipedia and Wikimedia.

I would note for this list her high output of featured articles, many of them on works of women like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, from her chosen period of literary study, the late 18th and early 19th century, as well as biographies of some major and minor figures of that epoch (including the now-infamous [[Fanny Imlay]] article, one of the few nominated for deletion (albeit strategically) on the same day it was on the main page. Nobody *but* her could have defended that article on the talk page as well as she did (compare with yours truly, a few grafs down)). Oh, and a nice collaboration with another editor on [[Joseph Priestley House]].

Are there any further details on the circumstances of her death, like where and what she was doing or attempting to do at the time? I ask only because they will inevitably be reported in this year's "Accidents in North American Mountaineering" along with the usual critique, and it would be useful to know before reading it since names are not usually given and I would like to know so I know when I'm reading about the death of an acquaintance.

Daniel Case

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Lane Rasberry
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