Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-06-27/Obituary


 * This article was written by twenty-four Wikipedians.

The Wikipedia community was deeply saddened in early May to hear of the death of SlimVirgin, also known as SarahSV or Sarah, who began editing in November 2004 and became an integral, respected, and influential member of the community. She was foundational in developing many of Wikipedia's core policies, including biographies of living persons, no original research, and verifiability, and drew on her wide range of interests to write some of Wikipedia's finest content.

A prolific contributor, her edits, numbering more than 177,000, give insight into the project's often difficult evolution since its early days. In March 2005 she was nominated for adminship and passed with a majority of 77 to 1. SarahSV's intelligence, direct manner, broad range of policy knowledge, and lucid writing were highly regarded, and for many years her talkpage was the second-most-watchlisted, after '. Several editors, on learning of her passing, described her on her talk page memorial as "irreplaceable" to Wikipedia. Her final edit was on April 18, 2021.

Policy development
SarahSV was instrumental in establishing verifiability, not truth. She helped to develop a number of policies that are at the core of the project. After the 2005 Seigenthaler biography incident she played a key role in formulating an early draft of the biographies of living persons policy and in negotiating community acceptance. She continued to watch over and hone the policy, and made nearly half of all edits to the page.

In 2006, SarahSV proposed that the verifiability and no original research policies be consolidated as an attribution policy. Although that merger did not gain consensus after a vote of 424 supports to 354 opposes, her leadership led to significant improvement of both policies, which have served as templates to similar policies on more than 70 Wikipedias. In recent years she was active in simplifying, clarifying, and structurally improving the conflict of interest guideline and related pages.

SarahSV embraced controversial subjects. In her first week on Wikipedia she created the article Death of Jeremiah Duggan, related to the LaRouche movement, which led to her first arbitration case. Both on- and off-wiki she was subjected to extensive harassment, stalking, and misogyny, particularly in the early years. Her experiences helped to inform the community's policies on personal attacks, harassment, and the use of external attack sites. Over time, many of these principles have been incorporated into both Wikimedia Foundation and broader Wikimedia community policies; the current draft of the Wikimedia community universal code of conduct reflects many principles she championed.

Creation of the Gender Gap Task Force
Since her first years at Wikipedia, SarahSV actively sought to highlight and counter systemic bias and to reduce the gender gap. In May 2013 she formed the Gender Gap Task Force to gather information on the gender gap among both editors and content, and to reduce these by encouraging new editors and content development. The Task Force has grown to more than 170 editors who work closely with other WikiProjects in promoting content drives.

SarahSV participated on the Gender Gap Mailing List, promoted editing salons focused on relevant subjects, wrote and improved articles about women, and authored the essay Writing about women. Of particular note, she brought Female genital mutilation to featured article status in 2014. The article was described by the late Brianboulton as covering "a difficult and challenging topic", and "an important contribution to Wikipedia". J Milburn agreed, congratulating her "fortitude in tackling such a difficult and yet important subject". On February 6, 2015, on the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, it appeared on Wikipedia's homepage as Today's featured article. The article was later recognized by the community with a Million Award.

Featured and other article work
SarahSV was a meticulous researcher, an expert at evaluating sources, and a clear and concise writer. She had eclectic interests and worked on a broad range of topics—including justice, race relations, philosophy, literature, human and animal rights, the Holocaust, religion and faith, current events, and conspiracy theories. She was greatly respected in the FAC community, where she made important contributions to setting and improving standards for featured articles, not least through the quality of her nominations. She was an eloquent, facts-based, and demanding FAC reviewer, and many nominators found her insistence on the correct use of sources intimidating. A consensus is that her guidance was always constructive: on reviewing one biography, she advised editors to "bring out some of the colour, things that make him three-dimensional for the reader ... [to] bring him to life".

She brought Bernard Williams to featured-article status in December 2004, followed in 2006 by three further featured articles: Joel Brand, Rudolph Vrba, and Elie Wiesel's book Night. She nominated Brown Dog Affair in 2007 as a collaboration with other editors. In 2009 she successfully nominated Abu Nidal, Stanley Green, and Marshalsea, followed a year later by the Killing of Muhammad al-Durrah and Death of Ian Tomlinson. In 2014 she was part of a collaboration that brought the notoriously difficult and complex poet Ezra Pound to FA status.

SarahSV's editing reveals a focus of great breadth and depth. She uploaded almost 3000 files, created 4174 pages, and edited more than 22,000 articles; twelve of which she edited more than 1000 times. When working to achieve good article or featured status, she often expanded related articles, such as the Holocaust, Rudolf Vrba, and Christian Science. Other articles on typically difficult subjects that can in large part be credited to her include veganism, Bad Pharma, the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and Chelsea Manning. She was continuing her work on the Holocaust and the Auschwitz concentration camp until her last edits in late April 2021.