Hi everybody,

I would like to refer us to an article on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender . An extract from the link as follows: "The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender, although they interact closely in many languages."

When we speak of 'gender neutrality' in language we refer to changing the masculine word used, i.e. 'he shall', not for a female word 'she shall', but as far as practicable to neutralise the wording, i.e. 'they shall' or change the syntax entirely in order to avoid the use of using the male or female sex; 'pronouns' in this example. Women don't really want to read a manual where the instruction or information is described throughout as 'he'. We opt for non-gender specific language in lieu of this.

It is usually the creators of the dictionary of a country that nominate the grammatical gender of a word. In France for instance they have the French Academy, called 'académie française'. Wikipedia's grammatical gender will be decided by the grammar used in a given country and it is far from objective; but it is grammatical gender, not a description of male and female/man and woman biological gender. In France the French Academy have traditionally been the institution that assign the gender to a noun. It would be interesting to compare, not so much across countries, but within countries to examine the grammatical gender allocated to various words, because in many instances is has no relationship to male or female, and it's quite a mystery how the nouns are allocated a specific gender, and excuse this aside but I used to think on this and wonder why all the strong, positive, and creative words seemed to be assigned the grammatical masculine gender. As the extract above says, "The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender...'., so we don't speak of grammatically gendered words as being female or feminine in the biological sense; words are classified, grammatically, into at least three categories, feminine, masculine, neuter. They don't refer to men and women, as does the notion 'non-gender specific language' which does address the biological usage of female and male words in sentences. And there is a large body of work in all disciplines that have traditionally referred to 'he' when they mean 'he' and 'she'. It is only in recent decades that this error is being addressed.

Thank you, Anne Frazer WMAU

----- Original Message ----- From: Sarah Stierch To: Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects Cc: Victor Grigas Sent: Friday, December 30, 2011 1:14 PM Subject: [Gendergap] What Gender is Wikipedia?

Hi folks,

While a discussion was taking place on this list about gender neutrality and language, Victor (User:victorgrigas) and I were having a conversation about it via email. Victor decided to create a page about "what language is Wikipedia?"

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_Gender_Is_Wikipedia

Hopefully you will contribute to your own and other languages.

Interesting mention about Russian Wikipedia, it states that they refer to Wikipedia as a female, similar to how in English we refer to ships as women.

Aweee...even Klingon is featured }:) (How sentimental!)

-Sarah

-- Sarah Stierch Wikimedia Foundation Community Fellow

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