Erik Moeller, 29/12/2011 03:35:
[*] For even more technical detail: The gender setting
in the user
preferences, and taking gender into account in the localization,
pre-dates the gender localization of the User: namespace. The User:
namespace localization by gender was just a particularly tricky case
of taking that setting into account and was only deployed with
MediaWiki 1.18.
Thanks to Nikerabbit I've added a list of languages which currently use
this feature, for the sake of clarity (it wasn't documented anywhere):
current location
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MediaWiki_architecture#Interface_lang…
(end of the paragraph).
Nemo