Hello,
I'm Lori, a stay at home mom and museum studies graduate student in Indianapolis who has quickly become known as "the Wikipedia girl" in my grad program. I'm a project leader for WikiProject:Public Art, along with Sarah Stierch (thank you for the kind words, Sarah!). I'm also the current Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis and I've developed some Wikipedia-related programming for the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Nina made some great points about the Mommy blogger world and the Wikipedia world. I am of both "worlds" and feel that they really should be brought together. Stay at home moms especially utilize technology to feel more connected to the outside world; being a stay at home mom can feel very alienating otherwise. So many moms are extremely well educated and have left their careers to stay home, only to begin to feel restless (*raising hand*). It's very true that if this group was more aware of the altruistic nature of sharing knowledge on Wikipedia, they would jump at the chance to join such a community. I've had many of my fellow Mommy bloggers curiously ask about what I do. There's real interest there. They're also very interested in Wikipedia's role as an educational tool, which is something I'm very interested in too.
This is not all about SAHM's but felt that I should expound on that point, because it's a great one! I also want to reiterate the American Association of Museum (AAM)'s Future of Museum's tweet yesterday that brought together the points of the NYTimes article and Nina Simon's recent posthttp://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2011/01/want-to-get-your-content-out-there-put.htmlthat museum's should put their content on Wikipedia. They made the point that the museum world is very much a female majority, and Wikipedia is a female minority - it makes sense that the cultural sector has been so slow to warm up to sharing content on Wikipedia. I hope to help change that through the Wikimedia GLAM initiative http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM.
This year I intend to complete an Independent Study to research & write a (hopefully substantial) article regarding the role of Wikipedia in museum programming in order to teach 21st century research/technology/collaborative skills to our communities while also sharing museum research and increasing accessibility to collections. I think that the gender gap issue is an important factor to consider in this.
This is certainly an important topic and I look forward to learning & sharing more! As Sarah said - we'll hopefully make a big splash at Wikimania! :)
Lori