Adrianne Wadewitz

She published on topics including 18th-century children's literature, ambiguity in historical scholarship, and use of Wikipedia in the classroom.

"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'. This was brought home most vividly to me one day when I was climbing outdoors here in Los Angeles and people on the beach were marveling at those of us climbing. 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. It is an enormous goal and I would love to hear how others work at achieving it with their students."

On April 8, 2014, Wadewitz died from head injuries sustained a week earlier in a rock climbing fall at Joshua Tree National Park. Sue Gardner, then executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, described Wadewitz's death as a "huge loss" and said she may have been Wikipedia's "single biggest contributor on ... female authors [and] women's history".

Wadewitz enjoyed rock climbing, which she described in 2013 as enabling "a new narrative about herself beyond that of a bookish, piano-playing Wikipedia contributor":

Obituaries for her were published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Corriere della Sera, amongst others. The Sydney Morning Herald also republished one of her last blog posts, in which she discussed how engaging with a difficult activity had taught her about helping students with their own difficulties, partly by teaching them to celebrate the little successes on the way to a goal. She wrote that, "Ultimately, nothing was more helpful for me than failing repeatedly" and that she wanted her students to realize that failures could be part of learning and were nothing to be ashamed of. The journal ABO, which Wadewitz had worked for from 2011 to 2012, dedicated its March 2014 issue to Wadewitz.

In 2009, Wadewitz began putting The New England Primer online, culminating in a permanent online exhibit in 2012, with text and annotated transcriptions.

Wadewitz made her first edit on Wikipedia in 2004, and went on to create articles on female writers and scholars, several of them becoming featured articles. She originally edited anonymously for several years before revealing her gender. She made nearly 50,000 edits in all.

Wadewitz graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University, and later received her masters and doctoral degrees in British literature with a minor in 18th-century studies from Indiana University. She completed both a master's thesis, Doubting Thomas': The Failure of Religious Appropriation in The Age of Reason (2003), and her doctoral dissertation, 'Spare the Sympathy, Spoil the Child:' Sensibility, Selfhood, and the Maturing Reader, 1775–1815 (2011).

Adrianne Wadewitz (January 6, 1977 – April 8, 2014) was an American feminist scholar of 18th-century British literature, and a noted Wikipedian and commenter upon Wikipedia, particularly focusing on gender issues. In April 2014, Wadewitz died from head injuries from a fall while rock climbing.

The only child of Betty M., a nurse and attorney, and Nathan R. Wadewitz, a Lutheran pastor, Adrianne Wadewitz was born on January 6, 1977, in Omaha, Nebraska. She graduated from North Platte High School in 1995. Wadewitz studied English literature and received a degree in English from Columbia University in 1999. In 2011, she obtained a Ph.D. from Indiana University and became a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Digital Learning and Research at Occidental College. She was chosen as a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow and a HASTAC scholar.