Alison Wheeler
This article uses material from Wipipedia website Alison Wheeler (born April 13, 1956), also known as VampWillow, is a British political activist. She had two administrator accounts on Wikipedia (VampWillow and AlisonW), but on 14 February 2008 VampWillow exercised her right to vanish. She is also an administrator on Wipipedia as VampWillow.
An organizer of the London Lesbian and Gay Pride march and festival from 1983 to 1991, Wheeler was a founding member of the London chapter of the Lesbian Avengers and of the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in the 1980s. She was chief engineer of the RSL radio station Brazen Radio in 1994 which was the UK's first women-only broadcast radio station.
Outside her work in gay and women's politics, Alison Wheeler was an active member of the Liberal Democrats at a national level, as a vice-president of Delga and its Chair during 2004, and also serving on other Party organizations.
Born in Hemel Hempstead, Wheeler discovered an interest in computers, first on a Shorts' Valve-based (vacuum-tube) analog computer at Apsley Grammar School, where she also taught a course in BASIC for the DEC PDP-10 and was taught music composition by Iris du Pré. She went to Imperial College London in 1974 to read Computing Science, though dropped out after two years. Since then, however, Wheeler has received a Certificate of Natural Science from the Open University, and an MBA from the Open University Business School.
Her major source of employment is in IT consultancy, having previously been Head of Technology at Capital Radio and other companies.
Wheeler, who currently lives in Highgate, is also Chair of Wiki Educational Resources Ltd, the legal entity which acts as the UK chapter of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the development of open-content wiki projects. In March 2007, she tendered her resignation as Chair, announcing this publicly via the Wikimedia UK mailing list.
She had an article about her on Wikipedia which, as VampWillow, she had helped to defend against one attempt at deletion. After user VampWillow vanished, there was a second (successful) move to delete the article.
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