Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-07-04/Obituary

We are deeply saddened to inform you about the death of four Wikipedia contributors, Hanif Al Husaini, Salazarov, Hyacinth, and PirjanovNurlan.

Hanif Al Husaini
Hanif Al Husaini first joined Wikipedia in January 2014, making his first edits in June 2015. Throughout the years he was part of the community, he made over 15,000 edits about a variety of subjects, including the STEM fields, biology and his native country of Indonesia.

A frequent contributor over at Wikivoyage, as well as OpenStreetMap, Hanif was also heavily involved in ITN and the Vital Articles project, and was considered as a good copyeditor. He was awarded the Precious award in February 2021 and the Editor of the Week award in January 2023. Sadly, he passed away on May 27, 2024.

Salazarov
Muhammadali Ikramov, known on Wikipedia as Salazarov, first joined Wikipedia in May 2022. He was mainly active on the Uzbek Wikipedia, where he made over 22,000 contributions and served as an administrator since June 2023. He also contributed to the English Wikipedia, where he focused on the WikiProjects Uzbekistan and Women in Red, as well as other Wikimedia portals, such as Wikidata, Wikiquote, Commons and Meta.

Ikramov died by drowning on June 19, 2024. As reported by fellow Uzbek user Nataev, Wikimedians of the Uzbek Language User Group released a public statement celebrating his life and contributions to WMF, which were also highlighted by several national media.

Hyacinth
Mikhail Lewis, known on Wikipedia as Hyacinth, was born in Great Falls, Montana on September 20, 1981, and raised in Helena. A veteran of Wikipedia, he first joined the platform in 2003, subsequently becoming an admin the following year. He made almost 177,000 contributions, mostly on music-related pages: among other achievements, he notably created the List of music students by teacher system.

Mikhail was first diagnosed with epilepsy as a young adult, and struggled with the condition ever since, although he stated that he had stopped experiencing tonic–clonic seizures in 2016. He passed away on December 9, 2023, aged 42, due to the complications of a seizure. The Helena Independent Record published an obituary about him on December 30, 2023, but the news was first reported on-wiki by user Graham87 on June 30 of this year.

PirjanovNurlan
Nurlan Pirjanov joined Wikipedia in August 2022, contributing extensively to reviving the Karakalpak Wikipedia, which until then had remained in the old spelling. He worked mainly on localization of the project (turning the entries on the site pages into the Karakalpak language) and soon became an administrator on the Karakalpak Wikipedia for a year.

He was active at translatewiki.net, at which he contributed to the interface of the Karakalpak Wikipedia with more than 1700 translations, and that was also Nurlan, who sent a request for the opening of the full version of Karakalpak Wiktionary, which was officially launched in May 2024, to the language committee of the Wikimedia Foundation. He taught how to edit articles as well as creating new ones on the Karakalpak Wikipedia to the students of the Faculty of Journalism at Karakalpak State University, where he was very kind with newer editors.

Pirjanov passed away on June 26, 2024, at the age of 27.