2011/2/14 Daniel and Elizabeth Case dancase@frontiernet.net:

Of course, another question no one's asked is: just what is the practical effect or effects of indicating a gender preference on enwiki right now?

1) If you change your user interface language to a language that is highly gendered, it will show appropriate messages. (There's only one message, I believe, in English which is gender-customized.)

2) Some user boxes and other templates make use of the gender preference to say things in a gender-specific way (instead of using "he/she" or "they").

I think that's it.