User:PaulieZiegfeld

Oh oh those summer niiiiiights

Hi I'm code name: PaulieZiegfeld. I'm a working professional based in the USA, east coast, who has always been tempted to contribute to/improve Wikipedia but the process intimidated me, so here I am, learning, or trying to. I can go down the rabbit hole on anything, but my fave subjects / expertise lies in history, comedy, popular fiction, mathematics, food, the science of all kinds of popular stuff, and just a desire for integrity in the information that's floating in the world.

It drives me nuts when info on some of my fave living people is wrong, or incomplete, so I'm here to hopefully contribute for and to the good.

I hope people here are nice and not super mean. I'm kind of mad at myself for running away more than a decade ago, and more than a decade before that when people were mean. I've been working online writing, editing and creating since before Wikipedia existed and I should've worked harder to crack it. Trying to make up for lost time.

Update Aug 11: Increasingly alarmed by all the notable woman I know who are absent on Wikipedia, I learned a lot more about the ways Wikimedia Org has tried to address gender bias. When I saw they really have identified all the reasons women don't contribute here, or get representation, it was an arrow to my heart because nearly every one of those reasons is why I came in and came out a revolving door here. From the Gender bias on Wikipedia page, in August 2013, Sue Gardner said, "I didn't solve it. We didn't solve it. The Wikimedia Foundation didn't solve it. The solution won't come from the Wikimedia Foundation."

I'm an outsider, and I really want to solve it. Bob Dylan wrote, how does it feel to be a complete unknown? I know. My late mother knows. And so do all the other Women in Red. Maybe we call ourselves "Invisible now" as we have no secrets to conceal, or maybe I've got nothing, so I've got nothing to lose. We'll see. Speaking of Dylan, my late mother Edith Layton was roommates with Sara Lownds / Dylan / Noznisky. Known on Wiki as Sara Dylan.

Honest moment: I chose my current user name so people wouldn't know I was a woman, I feared being "out" as a woman on Wikipedia might make my contributions more likely to be deleted because way lack when I had female presenting names and people weren't nice. But to be honest, I was working more than full time and performing and taking care of sick parents / babies / kids and getting into the weeds on Wikipedia is not something I had time or money to do. I also didn't list female artists as one of my passions here in the bio as I feared being seen for that. Maybe I'm dumb, but that was what I did. I'll leave the original interests up top as a monument to what was.