On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 8:30 AM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Although it’s not a proposal to do research per se, I
think this is a
proposal that researchers need to support as it’s pretty fundamental:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Face_new_editors_with_the_po…
..
... It should be made
clear that this information is for WMF's statistical/research purposes and
not disclosed to others. ...
The gender user preference, which that proposal is currently about, is
public data. Under the gender preference is the following small print
(English; other languages should be similar)
"Setting this preference is optional. The software uses its value to
address you and to mention you to others using the appropriate
grammatical gender. This information will be public."
It is exposed via User page names and the 'gender' parser functions
(see 'gender' on
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words)
Maybe we would see more people filling it in if there was an option
for it to be non-public. But then the software is collecting
information which is not used by the software.
Or put a different way: what ways can the MediaWiki software benefit
from a non-public gender setting?
--
John Vandenberg