https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Defaulting_to_gender...

Hi, apologies for cross-posting, this was suggested by someone reminding me that many people gave up on following wikimedia-l. :-)

One of the unplanned outcomes from the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin (waive out to all the lively GenderGappers I met), was that the various discussions over /feeling/ more welcoming in our language presumptions for non-male contributors made me think about taking some practical steps on my home project. Commons is lucky that having a standard policy language of English makes it easier to use neutral gender in policy statements. I'm taking that further by proposing that we stick to a neutral gender for all our policies and help pages. In practice this means that policies avoid using "he or she" and stick to "they" or avoid using a pronoun at all. I'm hoping that the outcome will feel like a much more natural space for people like me that prefer to stay gender neutral, possibly give a slightly safer feeling to the project by the very act of making the effort, as well as avoiding an over-emphasis on binary gender when it's pretty easy to simply avoid it.

Comments are welcome on the specific proposal above, or you may have ideas for other local projects to do something similar. I'm aware that this is much more difficult to make progress on in languages such as German or Spanish that have a presumption of male/female gender within their vocabulary, so any cases of on-project initiatives in non-English would be especially interesting. Solving these challenges is an opportunity to make our projects a leader on gender neutrality, for example something like getting a Wikimedia based consensus to adopt terms like "Latinx".[1]

Links: 1. "Latinx" is a reaction against using gendered forms Latino and Latina, in a language that has no neutral gender. This is becoming an accepted practice in related forums and academic publications. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-people-are-using-the-term-latinx_us_...

Thanks, Fae Wikimedia LGBT+ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT/Portal -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae