Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-26/Obituary

David Goodman, user:DGG, passed away peacefully in his sleep on the night of Thursday April 6, 2023. His wife Esther and daughter Eve report that he was in good health and spirit hours before his passing of sudden heart failure. His friends at Wikimedia New York City knew David as an event host, Wikipedia trainer, and ideological advocate for universal access to knowledge and library resources. Online, many Wikimedia editors knew David as a member of the Arbitration Committee, for development of the Articles for deletion review process, and for his position statements on social and ethical issues in the Wikimedia Movement.

Having just retired as an academic librarian and looking for something new, David registered his Wikipedia account on September 4, 2006, making 320,869 edits to the wikis, with his last edit days before his passing. The first record of his joining an in-person wiki event is August 2007 at the inaugural Wiknic in Manhattan's Central Park, and he was part of the subsequent November 2007 meeting in his Brooklyn neighborhood when local planning began. In January 2009 David co-founded Wikimedia New York City (Wiki NYC) and until only recently, David's home address was the headquarters for the organization, even hosting some key meetings refreshed by a tradition of siphon seltzer bottles. In July 2009 he coordinated Wikipedia at the Library as the first formal Wiki NYC outreach and education campaign, and possibly the first edit-a-thon geared toward the general public anywhere. Following that precedent, the Wiki NYC strategic direction has been to seek and sustain library partnerships. This soon developed into university partnerships in the Wikipedia Education Program and to comparable educational events at community centers and nonprofit organizations. David himself served as a trainer for hundreds of in-person Wiki NYC events and he encouraged others in the chapter to hold about 1,000 in-person events to date. In all planning, David advocated matching New York City's cultural and language diversity to Wikimedia Movement goals for outreach.

From 2015 to 2018, and again in 2020, David was thrice elected to serve on the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee. In his campaign statements in 2018 and 2019, David described his own interests and accomplishments during his term as being stricter in expecting that all Wikipedia editors uphold standards of civility; redesigning Wikipedia's arbitration process to be simpler and more accessible to editors rather than administrators; and issuing rulings that Wikipedia editors could reasonably apply to resolve conflict and advance Wikipedia's editorial process.

He encouraged more direct Wikimedia community enforcement of the Wikimedia Terms of Use to counter conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia. Outside of ArbCom but complementary to his activities there, David was a prolific evaluator in the AfD process. Records show that he took positions on keeping or deleting Wikipedia articles through over 27,000 edits, and socially he was known for evaluating companies, products, brands, CEOs, and self-named philanthropists. As article evaluation is always a community process in Wikipedia, everyone who regularly participated in these discussions encountered David in the slate of reviews. Additionally, every public relations or communications company who sent paid editors to post promotional content on Wikipedia faced David's judgment, where he practiced endless patience for those who could submit content in compliance with Wikipedia's notability guidelines, and fair dismissal for everyone else. Whenever more community comment was needed, David was a regular poster to Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.

In addition to routine in-person training around New York City, David was a co-founder of WikiConference North America, first held in New York City in 2014. That annual event series continues to present, as documented on Meta-Wiki. Beyond the ongoing impact of hosting networks of Wikipedia volunteers annually, the conference also established the Wikimedia New York City Friendly space policies which David co-initiated, and which he taught many times to Wikipedia editors online and offline. David's talks at Wikimedia conferences included "New Editors", "Paid Editing Moderated Discussion" (covered in media), "Reimagining the article submission process", "Promotionalism vs. Notability" and "Why Consensus Fails".

On the English Wikipedia itself, David's most edited articles were open access, ebook, printing press, Johannes Gutenberg, and phage therapy. These editorial contributions reflect a professional life close to his own personal interests. David was born May 23, 1943 in Philadelphia. After David moved to New York City in his youth, he met Esther, and both attended the local Midwood High School and Brooklyn College. They were together at Berkeley in the 1960s, and involved in opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War. David was influenced by the anti-war Free Speech Movement while at Berkeley, as part of the emerging New Left, distinguished from his father's "Old Left" experience associated with The Militant. The couple married when they returned to New York in 1971. He received a bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College, a master of library science degree from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. In his early career, he practiced information science with various universities, while from mid-career he was at Princeton University as Chemistry Librarian, then Biology Librarian, and finally as Research Librarian and Biological Sciences Bibliographer. From 2002 until his retirement in 2006, he taught as a professor in the Master's program at the Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Long Island University, then immediately launched his wiki-career. Esther and David shared a lifelong passion for literature, intellectual debate, and Jewish secularism. Although he was a great lover of public libraries, his own home had at least as much space for books as anything else. Somehow, though he continuously gave them away and passed them around, visitors to his home noted that the total number of books never diminished.

Editors are leaving their condolences and memories on his talk page. Additionally, some of his friends and colleagues remember him below: