Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where
personal nouns are gendered will always display the
masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it from a
new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so
because community majority has not seen to changing that
space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note
on gender stats
best,
Claudia
---------- Original Message -----------
From:Frances Hocutt <fhocutt(a)wikimedia.org>
To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800
Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson
<mjn(a)anadrome.org> wrote:
>
> Frances Hocutt <fhocutt(a)wikimedia.org> writes:
>
> > One change that could address the latter incentive is
to change the
> > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine
grammatical
gender is not the
> > default for new users. It could be randomly
assigned,
and then some men
> as
> > well as some women would have the incentive to set
their gender
> preferences.
>
> That's how it currently works, according to the manual,
with the default
> gender set to 'unknown':
>
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
>
> I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in
effect on
Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My
understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong--
is that an "unknown" user in a language where
personal nouns are gendered will always display
the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of
unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't
need to change his gender in preferences in order
to be described accurately where a female user
would need to set her gender in order to be
described as "Usuaria". Hence, different
incentives, and ones that could be addressed with
different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
------- End of Original Message -------