People From Omaha

"She was one of the top 10 editors in terms of producing a lot of high-quality content. Wikipedia is full of brilliant, talented people. She really stood out."

"The 37-year-old was remarkable not just for Wadewitz’ Wikipedia contributions, but for her focus on chronicling the overwhelmingly under-researched roles played by women in history and present-day life."

"Legendary in the Wikipedia world, Wadewitz had more than 50,000 'edits' or contributions to her credit. She also was the author of 36 'featured' articles, the highest distinction bestowed by other Wikipedians based on accuracy, fairness, style and comprehensiveness."

"Dr. Wadewitz wrote and edited extensively on Wikipedia during the final 10 years of her life, contributing 36 featured articles and more than 49,000 edits."

"Wadewitz eventually came out as a Wikipedian, the term the encyclopedia uses to describe the tens of thousands of volunteers who write and edit its pages. A rarity as a woman in the male-centric Wikipedia universe, she became one of its most valued and prolific contributors as well as a force for diversifying its ranks and demystifying its inner workings."

"Wadewitz, a US academic, became one of the most prolific and influential editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia."

"Wadewitz was an educator who did not live to make money from her knowledge. Instead, she chose to spread her knowledge as freely as possible for the good of readers everywhere."

"Unlike the Wikipedia editor stereotype, Wadewitz was not a young male who was tech-obsessed. Still she found Wikipedia appealing as a way to spread her academic knowledge, which was sometimes seen by few, whereas her encyclopedic entries might be read by millions."

"One of the things about Adrianne I was always grateful for was that she always wanted to learn and experience more things in the world. She was very thoughtful and interested. She loved literature and reading."

"Ms. Wadewitz’s interest in rock climbing played out on Wikipedia. Her last editing was to improve an article about Steph Davis, a prominent female climber and wingsuit flier. In Ms. Wadewitz’s hands, the article became filled with personal details, spectacular photos, a highlighted quotation and 25 footnotes."

"Adrianne Wadewitz exemplifies the early-career professional HASTAC Scholars is designed to mentor . . . because she represents the best of academe."

"Wadewitz was probably best known as a longtime Wikipedia editor. She edited her first entry in 2004, and went on to create pages for female writers, scholars, and their works, editing nearly 50,000 posts in total"

"She really was a person who cared very much about others. She worked for justice and inclusion and making sure that women's voices were heard. She wasn't willing to just accept the world as we were told it was, but worked to help make it more beautiful. I am very grateful for her bringing that into my life."

"Wadewitz said to attract more women editors, attitudes within the Wikipedia community need to change. This became clear when she revealed her gender, after writing anonymously for several years."

"So I think one thing that Wikipedia has to do as a culture is ask itself, 'Are we willing– to be this– this self-selecting– and– and be this small?' We can have many more people if we’re willing to be a more welcoming community."

"So in one respect, I would say that we need to add the voice of feminists to Wikipedia who are going to talk about– women as underrepresented groups."

"We brought in an innovative group of young digital humanists led by Adrianne Wadewitz."

"We definitely wanna increase the number of women. But just increasing the number of women isn’t necessarily going to– improve the– the fact that content on Wikipedia itself is skewed."

"Adrianne Wadewitz is a model of the future we all want for our profession, for our students, for our society."

"If a piece of information is wrong or misrepresented on Wikipedia, it affects the way the entire world sees that topic."

"When Wadewitz showed Wikipedia's main page to her class one day, she found that the women featured were largely sexualised or portrayed as victims of a crime, while people of colour were represented as perpetrators of a crime."

"Teachers frequently talk about moments in which they became students again and how much that made them better teachers. For me, there has been no better way to improve my teaching, specifically my teaching in the composition classroom, than to take up a subject at which I am abysmal."

"While nearly all of us use the Internet to fact check, learn about topics and read the news, some of us contribute more than others to the knowledge pool. Adrianne Wadewitz was one such woman."

"Wadewitz used Wikipedia as a way to spread and improve knowledge on the period she focused, adding to biographies of women writers and thinkers. Wadewitz made her first edit on July 18, 2004, and over the course of her career made approximately 49,000 edits."

"When we’re talking both to Wikipedians and people outside of Wikipedia, we say, 'Look, if we want to include all of these other narratives besides the typical narrative that we usually tell of dead white men, we’ve gotta get it in there now.'"

"Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience - that radical switch and growth"

"If you've ever used the crowd-sourced encyclopedia to find information on female writers (especially those from Dr. Wadewitz's area of expertise), it's likely that you've run into her work."

"It is a huge loss for Wikipedia. She may have been our single biggest contributor on these topics — female authors, women’s history."

"I know something about how the first encyclopedias were developed in the 18th century. And those encyclopedias almost completely excluded the history of women. And it’s one argument that we make all the time."

"When professors teach, they teach what they love. What they are experts in. What it is easy for them to learn. Thus, it is easy to forget what it is like to be the student who struggles in the classroom."

"When I used my real name, all of a sudden there was a lot of commentary. 'Oh, you're a woman' or 'You can't really be a woman' or 'You don't write like a woman.' Or all of a sudden my arguments were not taken as seriously or were judged as hysterical or emotional.... So I got much more interested in why this was happening."

"For me, one of the most empowering outcomes of my year of climbing has been the new narrative I can tell about myself. I am no longer “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, and Wikipedian”. I am now “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedian, and rock climber”."

"Wikipedia needs to recruit women, yes, but, more importantly, it needs to recruit feminists. And feminists can be of any gender."

"The words nearly break my heart, and I feel something crumble inside me. The truth is often a terrible thing, and I wish again that I were someone else. But it is too late now, too late to change anything. I am old and alone and I'm dying a little more with each passing hour. I'm tired, more tired than I've ever been."

"It was the way you looked at me while I looked at the art that changed me. It is you, in other words, who changed."

"What's your horse's name?""Horse.""Sophia waited for the joke, but it didn't come. "You call your horse 'Horse'?""He doesn't mind.""You should give him a noble name. Like Prince or Chief or something.""It might confuse him now.""Trust me. Anything is better than Horse. It's like naming a dog Dog.""I have a dog named Dog. Australian Cattle Dog." He turned, his expression utterly matter-of-fact. "Great herder.""And your mom didn't complain?""My mom named him."

"His voice, even now, follows me everywhere on this longest of rides, this thing called life."

"I had never dreamed of being a soldier; I had never fired a gun. I was not, nor ever had been, a fighter of any sort, but even so, I loved my country, and I spent much of that year trying to imagine a future distorted by war."

"...I said everything that matters... Don't take my advice. Or anyone's advice. Trust yourself. For good or for bad, happy or unhappy, it's your life, and what you do with it has always been entirely up to you."

"While she was exceptional, I was average, a man whose major accomplishment in life was to love her without reservation, and that would never change."

"I sometimes think to myself that I’m the last of my kind."

"As your father used to say, we shared the longest ride together, this thing called life, and mine has been filled with joy because of you."

"As much as I love her, I admit that she has always remained somewhat of an enigma to me...I liked this about her. I liked the mystery she added to my life. I liked the occasional silence between us, for ours was a comfortable silence. It was a passionate silence, one that had its roots in comfort and desire."

"'If there is a heaven, we will find each other again, for there is no heaven without you.'"

"[Written on back of photograph of Ruth and Daniel] "Ruth LevinsonThird grade teacher.She believes in me and I can be anything I want when I grow up.I can even change the world.""

"A truth emerges in any long marriage, and the truth is this: Our spouses sometimes know us better than we even know ourselves."

"I was not meant to be alone. I am not good at it. The years since Ruth's passing have ticked by with the kind of desparate silence known only to the elderly. It is a silence underscored by loneliness and the knowledge that the good years are already in the past, coupled with the complications of old age itself.The body is not meant to survive nearly a century. I speak from experience when I say this..."

"I wish I had the talent to paint the way I feel about you, for my words always feel inadequate. I imagine using red for your passion and pale blue for your kindness; forest green to reflect the depth of your empathy and bright yellow for your unflagging optimism. And still I wonder: can even an artist's palette capture the full range of what you mean to me?"

"My marriage brought great happiness into my life, but lately there's been nothing but sadness. I understand that love and tragedy go hand in hand, for there can't be one without the other, but nonetheless I find myself wondering whether the tradeoff is fair. A man should die as he had lived, I think; in his final moments, he should be surrounded and comforted by those he's always loved."

"In this world, after all, I've become more or less invisible...I've become what the young are afraid of becoming, just another member of the nameless elderly, an old and broken man with nothing left to offer to this world.My days are inconsequential, comprising simple moments and even simpler pleasures. I eat and sleep and think of Ruth; I wander the house and stare the the paintings, and in the mornings, I feed the pigeons that gather in my backyard."