[Gendergap] Hello

[Lori Byrd Phillips]

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
post<http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2011/01/want-to-get-your-content-out-there-put.html>that
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

-- 
Lori Byrd Phillips
| Museums & Motherhood <http://hstryqt.tumblr.com/>

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 7:58 AM, Nina Wikipedia <nina.wikipedia at gmail.com>wrote:

> I am Nina (Nina-no) from Norway. I am an Art historian, but have also
> Sociology and Cultural studies  in my background. I have been on the
> Norwegian Wikipedia from  2004.
>
> Yesterday we had was stories in the press in Norway about motherblogers ,
> and i am wondering why mothers are writing in blogs and Facebook and not on
> Wikipedia. I think we have to ask this question and try to find the answer.
>
> Nina
> nina.wikipedia at gmail.com
>
>
>
>
> Den 1. feb. 2011 kl. 13.44 skrev Sydney Poore:
>
> Joined the mailing list today.  I have a long standing interest in the
> gender gap on Wikimedia projects.
>
> My view is that the gender gap is real (based on stats and experience ) and
> harming our content because of the biases introduced from a male heavy
> culture.
>
> Sydney. Poore
> (FloNight)
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