The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s 'high five' photos

Bgubitz at English Wikipedia

Annie Rauwerda<br>Feb. 14, 2022

One reason I love the Wikipedia article for “high five” is that it’s one of those entries about an utterly basic aspect of everyday life that reads like it was written by a group of aliens observing human beings: “Its meaning varies with the context of use but can include as a greeting, congratulations, or celebration.”<br>But the high-five Wikipedia page is among my very favorites not because of its writing, but because of its iconic photos — specifically the ones in the section on the “too slow” variation:

“Up high.”Bgubitz at English Wikipedia

“Down low.”Bgubitz at English Wikipedia

Victim misses.Bgubitz at English Wikipedia

“Too slow!” (with finger-guns).Bgubitz at English Wikipedia

I love the aughts fashion, the use of the word “victim,” and the fact that “finger-guns” gets a hyperlink in the last caption. The woman in the photo gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the final image — she looks like she’s on the verge of tears — and her male counterpart couldn’t look more smug. The pictures are endearing and capture a kind of humanity you don’t find in your average stock photo.<br>The sequence was uploaded on August 14, 2008 by Bgubitz, a user who describes themself as an accountant who likes “sunsets and long walks on the beach.” Today, photos from the “too slow” series are featured on Wikipedia pages in eight languages and get more than 200,000 annual views.<br>A quick search of “high five wikipedia photo” shows that the images are an object of fascination for many others besides me. People around the world have noted that the pair looks a lot like Rachel and Chandler from Friends. But not everyone is a fan. In 2020, one particularly passionate Wikipedia user named Kugihot suggested the photos be removed because they were “simply a waste of precious Wikipedia public bytes.”<br>Writing on the article’s talk page, the forum where editors discuss the article at hand, the critic went on: “My main concern that is especially out of place to me is the final image which depicts the use of finger guns, which is arguably completely and utterly irrelevant in the context of different variations of high fives.”<br>To me, the fact that the photos inspired such extreme pedantry speaks to their power. Kugihot’s ridiculous suggestion was denied by other editors. Long live the high-five photos, finger guns and all!<br>I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five .<br>Thanks to an overabundance of time alone with my laptop and a growing pile of responsibilities that I wanted to push off, I found myself fixated on these photos recently. I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five — I mean, you can feel the chemistry through the screen. Just look at her smile in the first frame! Look at their gazes in the third frame! There’s no way two people so young and so beautiful could exchange such a flirty high five without feeling flutters of the heart.<br>I couldn’t help but wonder what their story was — and what had happened to them.<br>So I launched an investigation. I figured that the high-fivers must have some sort of internet presence, so I started combing the web for mentions of the photos. I saw that they’d graced the front page of Reddit several times, and one such post had a compelling comment:<br>“Fun fact: me and my wife (then girlfriend) are demonstrating the ‘too slow’ high five on the Wikipedia high five page.”<br>My eyes widened and my heart raced. Searching through the activity of that commenter’s account, I quickly gathered that the high-five guy loved indie-folk music, bourbon, and crossword puzzles. He had little kids, a soft spot for Yosemite National Park, and a Disneyland pass, which made me think he was from California. He seemed refreshingly wholesome (he provided calculus help to anonymous internet strangers on r/math) and sweet (he gave genuine advice to lovelorn posts posters in r/relationships).<br>He didn’t post often — only about once a month or so — and at first I was having difficulty finding anything that could confirm that he was indeed the finger-gunning high-fiver. But soon enough, I scrolled to a comment that confirmed my suspicion.<br>In a discussion of the photos in an r/askreddit post, he left a response deep in the comments: “For the 3-4 people who might see this, here is a picture of me and her on our wedding day.”

Tim and Tamara O’Nan

Photo evidence! “Victim misses” had become “victim Mrs.”!<br>Detective work<br>By this point, I’d read the guy high-fiver’s decade-old musings about philosophy and his recaps of Disneyland trips, which made me feel like I knew him on a personal level. But I still didn’t have any way to identify him.<br>Not surprisingly, searching Google for middle-aged men in California who like national parks and Sufjan Stevens didn’t yield anything of worth. I tried messaging him but didn’t get a response.<br>Then,...