when displaying messages containing usernames in Javascript code, one needs to pass the gender of the given user. This usually means sending a userinfo API query, possibly sending it to a different domain and forcing a DNS lookup (since the given user sometimes resides on another wiki, e.g. in the case of images transcluded from a repository such as Commons), which can be quite slow. The time and bandwidth spent on this is often wasted, since not all languages have the concept of gender; for such languages, the API request should be omitted.

So,

- how can I tell from Javascript code whether the current language supports genders? (I guess relying on that is not 100% failsafe, since even if it doesn't, a fallback language still might, but that sounds unlikely enough to ignore.)

- how can I tell whether a given message depends on the gender? I suppose I could grep for '{{gender', or use mw.language to parse it with all genders and check if the output differs, but both of those are ugly and fragile. Is there a better option?

thanks

Gergő