Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians/2022

Bamber Gascoigne ()
Bamber Gascoigne was a British television presenter and author, who presented the show University Challenge between 1962 and 1987. He was an editor and supporter of Wikipedia in its first decade, describing the project as an extraordinary global cooperative effort of which the best articles are unsurpassed and the worst rapidly improving. He died on 8 February 2022.

Nedim Ardoğa ()
Nedim Ardoğa was an electronic engineer who contributed to the English Wikipedia with articles related to Turkey. He created over 2,000 articles. He died after a brief illness on February 21, 2022.

Irving Buchbinder ()
Irving Buchbinder was a working podiatrist for forty-four years, and contributed to the English Wikipedia with medical knowledge as well as medical photographs from his practice. He died on February 23, 2022. His memorial can be found here.

Calton Bolick ()
Calton Bolick first edited Wikipedia in 2004, and had made over 78,000 edits over his last 13 years. He died after a brief illness on February 25, 2022.

Anthony Appleyard ()
Anthony Appleyard, who joined Wikipedia in 2004, was an administrator who specialised in working on requests for page moves and history merges. He was also a member of WikiProject Underwater diving. He died on 28 February 2022 in Manchester. At the time of his death, he was ranked in the top five (including bots) for all-time numbers of undeletions and uses of the history merge tool, per the admin stats page.

Moriori first edited Wikipedia in 2003, and had over 22,000 edits over 18 years and became an administrator in 2005. He mostly focused on pages about his home country, New Zealand, but also edited military articles. He appeared in the village stocks, a humorous page, after accidentally letting a prospective new editor move the main page with his account while she was at his computer. He died on 1 June 2022 in Kerikeri, New Zealand, aged 86.

Dan Horia Constantinescu ()
Dan Horia Constantinescu died in 2022. He was an administrator at the Romanian Wikipedia.

George Garrigues ()
George Garrigues made his first edit in 2006, and had contributed over 100,000 edits to the English Wikipedia by the time he died, aged 90, on August 10, 2022. A journalist and journalism professor whose published books included a biography of his father Charles Harris Garrigues, on Wikipedia he specialized in history and journalism and was a firm believer in editorial civility and politeness. He made his last edit on July 23, 2022. See his obituary on Legacy Remembers.

Peter Eckersley ()
Peter Eckersley was an Australian computer scientist, computer security researcher, and activist. He worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including as Chief Computer Scientist and Head of AI Policy. While at the EFF, Eckersley started projects including Let's Encrypt, Privacy Badger, Certbot, HTTPS Everywhere, SSL Observatory, and Panopticlick.

Peter was an early contributor to Wikipedia, participating at meetups in Melbourne. He died on September 2, 2022, in San Francisco. His brain was preserved by the cryonics organization Alcor Life Extension Foundation soon after.

Andreas Hörstemeier ()
Andreas Hörstemeier died on September 26, 2022, after a long and serious illness. An administrator, he began editing the English Wikipedia in January 2003, being most active on the site from that year until 2008. He specialised in writing about his native Germany and Thailand, where his wife was born, especially districts of these countries, along with uploading many images to Commons and prolific editing at Wikidata. There is a condolence page for him on the German Wikipedia.

Lisa Lodwick ()
Lisa Lodwick was an archaeobotanist specialising in agriculture in ancient Rome and an advocate for open access and open data in archaeology. She first edited Wikipedia in 2013, creating an article on British archaeologist Molly Cotton, and continued to edit until a few months before her death on 3 November 2022. Over that time she contributed just short of 90 articles, focusing on biographies of archaeologists and ancient historians. An active member of the Women's Classical Committee, WikiProject Women in Red, and WikiProject Archaeology, she worked hard to combat Wikipedia's gender bias, both by writing articles about notable women, and by organising editathons that inspired others to do the same. Her last article was about archaeobotanist Meriel McClatchie.

Kent G. Budge ()
Kent G. Budge was a computational physicist and a prolific Wikipedia editor on geology-related articles. He first edited in 2016, but only became prolific in 2020. Following a serious car accident on 20 August 2022, he continued to sporadically edit until 2 days before his death on 10 November 2022, as a result of complications relating to injuries inflicted during the car accident. Kent was a prolific editor of Wikipedia's coverage of the geology of his native state of New Mexico, and also hugely improved Wikipedia's coverage of topics of fundamental importance in geology, such as metamorphism, limestone, tuff, aeolian processes, orogeny, chert, magma, lava and weathering, having managed to take Banded iron formation, Alluvial fan, and Basalt to good article class. For those wanting to know more about his work outside of Wikipedia see here: Supervolcano: A Geologic History of the Jemez, and his road-trip blog Wanderlusting the Jemez.

Mary Urashima ()
Mary Adams Urashima was a historian with a focus on Historic Wintersburg in Huntington Beach, California. Mary wrote a book on Historic Wintersburg published in 2014 by the History Press. She passed away on November 20, 2022 after a battle with cancer.

Effie Kapsalis ()
Effie Kapsalis died on December 11, 2022. She was an inspiration and a force in the GLAM Wiki community, constantly pushing for cultural and heritage institutions to embrace Wikimedia collaboration, open content policies, and the goal of knowledge equity. As a longtime staff member of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, she pressed for more content to be released under a CC0 (public domain) license for upload to Wikimedia Commons, and supported Wikimedia DC and the greater wiki community in the hiring of Wikimedians in Residence. In 2020, this culminated in the Smithsonian adopting an Open Access initiative that released more than 3 million works under the CC0 license, with that number still growing. She fostered the creation of the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, inspired by the gender gap work within the Wikimedia community, and infused Wikipedia and Wikidata into the work of Smithsonian's Strategy 2022 (and now 2027) plans. As a result, today there is a deep and active set of Smithsonian Institution staff working with Wikidata and other Wikimedia initiatives, all thanks to Effie's restless and passionate push for them from Smithsonian's new Office of Digital Transformation, which she helped establish. But more important than all this, she was wonderful to work with as a colleague and a person. Her legacy will live on and will not be forgotten.

The family has set up a site in her memory.

Volodymyr Vakulenko
Ukrainian children's writer, activist, and longtime Wikipedia volunteer Volodymyr Vakulenko (Володимир Володимирович Вакуленко; 1 July 1972 – 2022) was a prolific contributor to the Ukrainian Wikipedia, where he wrote articles on poetry and literature.

He was abducted and murdered by the invading Russian army during the Russian occupation of Kharkiv Oblast.

Tancredo Westphal ()
Tancredo Westphal Jr., also known to his friends as "Tarsky", was a professor of engineering and a prolific contributor to Portuguese Wikipedia. He created 16,204 articles and made over 200,000 contributions to Wikimedia. Most of his edits were on improving content on science, especially Brazilian scientists, and fighting vandalism. He passed away on April 5, 2022, and is remembered by the Portuguese-speaking community as "an exemplary editor" and a "dedicated Wikimedian".

David Thomsen ()
David Thomsen died on November 25, 2022, at the age of 83. He was a prolific editor and a self-declared gnome who added to articles on Philadelphia, the United States, and created many new articles. David lived in Fairmount, Philadelphia. After earning a degree at Lafayette College and serving for two years with the US Army in West Germany, he worked for 27 years as a computer programmer for Sunoco. David began his post-retirement Wikipedia career on March 13, 2008; five years later, he had made 100,000 edits, mostly through gnoming. As of September 2023, he is the 52nd most active editor in Wikipedia. David was a member of the Guild of Copy Editors, and took part in its monthly drives and blitzes. He was also part of the WikiProject Article Rescue Squadron, saving uncited-but-promising articles from deletion. David was openly proud of his Wikipedia-editing activities, and he even designed his own Wikipedia-themed caps, which he wore to Philadelphia wiki-meetups and gave away to his fellow Wikipedians. Outside Wikipedia, David was a member of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Jay Pasachoff ()
Jay Pasachoff was an American astronomer at Williams College. According to the New York Times, he "probably saw more solar eclipses than any other human in history". In addition to his many academic achievements, he was "one of the best-connected scientists around", building a global network of contacts while proselytizing to the press and the public on issues of science. He also wrote several high school and college textbooks, and an updated edition of the Peterson Field Guide to the Stars and Planets (1999). The asteroid 5100 Pasachoff carries his memory through space. His first edit to Wikipedia was in 2005 about Pluto and his last was a few months before he died in 2022, about the 18th century astronomer John Bevis.

Carl Hewitt (, and )
Carl Hewitt was an American computer scientist known for developing the actor model of computation. He participated vigorously on Wikipedia to make certain his area of expertise was adequately chronicled, getting blocked several times in the process. He died on December 7, 2022, announced by a Stanford University colleague.