In memory of Holger Ellgaard - Wikimedia-l

25 Jan 2023

Holger Ellgaard – User:Holger.Ellgaard – has died.

Holger was one of the most prolific article writers on Swedish Wikipedia,
having written thousands of articles, with a couple of hundred thousand
edits on Swedish Wikipedia and another hundred thousand edits on Commons,
where he had uploaded more than fifty thousand photographs since coming to
the Wikimedia movement in the spring of 2007.

As we know, an edit count says very little in itself – myself, I have a
large number of minor fixes and few excellent articles. Holger, on the
other hand, wrote a large number of featured and good articles, the kind of
texts the community wanted to highlight as its best and put on the main
page for everyone to see.

Having spent his professional life as an architect and with a passion for
photography, he wrote about buildings and city planning, architecture and
infrastructure. His articles were long, well sourced and full of
illustrations, usually his own photos. He liked to visit a place before
writing about it, photographing it and making sure he had the pictures he
wanted.

Many of his best articles were more ambitious in scope. He wrote about
Swedish kitchen standard and the redevelopment of central Stockholm from
the 1950s to the 1970s. He wrote about any conceivable aspect of Stockholm
as a city: public toilets in Stockholm, traffic signals in Stockholm,
emergency housing in Stockholm, illuminated signs in Stockholm, railroad
tunnels in Stockholm and about so many other things.

When Wikimedia Sweden started giving out an annual award to someone who had
contributed to free knowledge, Holger was the inaugural recipient. He felt
like an obvious choice. Not only because of the amount of work he had put
into writing his articles, but also his willingness to help anyone writing
within his area of expertise.

He was a great public educator. And now he isn’t, and we’re less for his
absence.

//Johan Jönsson
--