Help:Buying Wikipedia/Johnathan Secret
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Johnathan Secret | |
|---|---|
 Secret in 2009 | |
| Born | June 12, 1977 |
| Died | May 11, 2014 (aged 36) |
| Cause of death | Old age |
| Occupation | Inventor |
| Known for | The Secret handshake |
Johnathan Secret is an American inventor, best known for inventing the "Secret handshake" used by Wikipedia to allow people to purchase Wikipedia and its contents. He also helped co-found the Wikipedia Purchase System to an extent, with the help of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in 2002.
Early life
[edit]Johnathan Onassis Secret was born in Ogden, Utah, the oldest of two children. His father, Justin Secret, was an airplane engineer, and his mother, Victoria Secret, was a beauty retailer. As a child, Johnathan Secret was notably shy, and was frequently bullied by his peers for refusing to speak when spoken to. This traumatized him to the point where he refused to speak. Instead, starting in second grade he would work for several years to develop a language that requires no speaking. His work would not be recognized because he accidentally reinvented American Sign Language (ASL) with only minor differences. Frustrated that his work was discredited, he worked to create a unique language without speaking. This dream was later abandoned because he realized there was nothing wrong with ASL and it worked just fine as an alternative to speaking. Secret graduated from Weber State University in 1999 with a focus on financing.
Career
[edit]Buying Wikipedia establishment and the Secret handshake
[edit]In June 2001, Secret was approached by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger explained to Secret that he and Jimmy Wales are working on a system where buying Wikipedia is possible, per request of their lawyers. He had a suspicion that the lawyers wanted to buy Wikipedia from them, so they made the cost very expensive but also wanted to make the purchasing process very difficult to avoid its purchase.[citation needed] They worked together to develop a complicated purchase system.
Secret and Sanger became close friends and developed a handshake whenever they would work on the project. The handshake became more and more complicated the more they met. The secret handshake was dubbed the Secret handshake, named after Secret, who contributed to most of its creation. The handshake would incorporate various inside jokes and preferences of Secret and Sanger. These include retrieving a cup of black coffee per Sanger's love of black coffee, the stick-shift fist bump as Secret once crashed a borrowed vehicle for not knowing how to drive stick-shift, discussion of the show Full House as they both enjoyed watching the show, and the force-field fist bump as Secret accidentally created a scientific formula for a working invisible force-field. The handshake was fully completed on June 8, 2001, according to Sanger. When the two realized the complexity of the Secret handshake, they decided to make it an official part of the Wikipedia Purchase System. Sanger was laid off from Wikipedia in February 2002, and Secret continued to work on the Wikipedia Purchase System and would consult Sanger for advice. The Secret handshake was first publicly mentioned alongside the announcement of being able to buy Wikipedia on November 12, 2002.
Retirement and secret handshake moderation
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Secret would step down from working with Wikipedia in 2005 to focus on other projects. After another failed attempt to reinvent ASL in 2008 among other projects, he retired from inventing in 2009, at the age of 32. The Secret handshake would be updated and made more complicated in the following years by a group of Wikipedia moderators, led by Preston Blunt.
Death
[edit]In 2011, Secret moved back to Ogden, Utah, where he lived peacefully before dying of old age. The doctors were perplexed, since it is considered atypical for a man to die from old age prematurely with no signs or symptoms before death. His death had a large impact and summoned a great amount of interest around the topic of the Wikipedia purchase system. Full House viewership ratings reached an all-time high in 2014, which experts speculate to be at least somewhat related to his death, since he enjoyed watching the show. In 2016, just two years after his death, The Man, The Myth, The Secret, a biography of his life, was released.