I've heard about this kind of thing happening to other women in Wikipedia, but this is the first time this has ever happened to me personally. A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from a guy who said he wanted to talk to me about what it was like being the parent of children with special needs. He also said that he got my number from my church, so I told him that I was busy at the moment (which I was) and that he could call me back later.
Yesterday afternoon, he called me back. I asked him where he got my number and how he found out about my parenting status. He said that he read what I had written on Wikipedia about my children, and that he wanted to talk to me about it because he was also developmentally disabled and had some "syndrome" that I didn't recognize. (It wasn't Asberger's, I don't think.) He also said that he had gotten my number from "some church thing," and that they had confirmed my phone number.
I told him that it was very inappropriate for him to call me, and he said, "Well, you said I could call you back!" I answered that I was in the middle of something the first time he called me, repeated how inappropriate he was being, and that I wasn't willing to speak with him over the phone. He said, "You said all that on Wikipedia," and I said that I didn't have my phone number there, to which he responded, "But your email address is there," and I said he could email me but calling me was again, inappropriate, and we hung up.
Like I said, it was the first time something like this has happened, even after more than four years of active participation in WP. It's somewhat disconcerting to me. When I think about it, this guy had to actively hunt down my phone number. He looked at my userpage, which has infoboxes stating that I'm a parent of two children with developmental disabilities, that I live in a small town in Idaho, and that I'm Catholic. (This makes me want to remove those infoboxes.) He actually went to the trouble of calling one of the the two Catholic churches in my town and confirm my number with them, which they did quite honestly because I'm on a church committee and active in the community. Freaky, huh?
I know that you need to tell people when something like this happens, especially people in your life. (I haven't been able to tell my husband about it yet; he's been working all weekend and we're coming off of a particularly stressful family situation.) So that's what I'm doing now. I can totally see why so many women don't identify their gender on WP now. I'd also like to get some advice from the members of this list, and to see if anyone else has had a similar experience and what they did about it.
Thanks,
Christine
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Christine W. Meyer