https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Defaulting_to_gende…
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(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae