Aaron Swartz commits suicide age 26
Swartz body is found by his girlfriend at his home in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn at around 9.30am. He was 26. Swartz’ attorney confirms in an email to The Tech blog.
The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true
He left no suicide note. Swartz’s mother writes on Hacker News:
Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful. Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable.
Publishes ‘Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’
Swartz, while in Eremo, Italy, releases a “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto,” calling for activists to “fight back” against the sequestering of scholarly papers and information behind pay walls.
It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file-sharing networks.
‘Who Writes Wikipedia’
Swartz writes an article examining the contributions to Wikipedia articles written during his candidacy for the Wikimedia Foundation board election in 2006. In the article Swartz disproves JimmyWales notion that the encyclopedia was created by 500-1000 core writers, and shows it was mainly created by occasional writers, many of whom did not register. He says this knowledge should inform Wikipedia policy:
If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit. Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional contributors, their opinions aren’t heard by the current Wikipedia process. They don’t get involved in policy debates, they don’t go to meetups, and they don’t hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they’re even proposed. Out of sight is out of mind, so it’s a short hop to thinking these invisible people aren’t particularly important. Thus Wales’s belief that 500 people wrote half an encyclopedia. Thus his assumption that outsiders contribute mostly vandalism and nonsense. And thus the comments you sometimes hear that making it hard to edit the site might be a good thing.
Attends Stanford
Swartz attends Stanford University for a year, leaving to start the software company Infogami, a startup that was funded by Y Combinator’s first Summer Founders Program. Infogami was built around a wiki backend, a subject of interest for Swartz since his early effort to develop ”theinfo”, a wiki-based encyclopedia
Aaron Swartz born in Chicago
Aaron Swartz is born in Chicago to William and Susan. He has two younger brothers, Noah and Ben.
Swartz paternal grandfather, William Swartz, was a multimillionaire businessman and founding director of the Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation.
William Swartz, who died in 1987 at age 75, was active in the nuclear-disarmament group Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. He also served as a director of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a Chicago-based magazine that calls out threats from nuclear weapons, climate change and emerging technologies in the life sciences.
Though Swartz attended North Shore Country Day School, a small private school in Winnetka, he became a teen-aged proponent of “unschooling.” He left high school during his freshman year to study on his own at home.