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MediaWiki 1.15.0rc1, a release candidate for the 2009 Q2 branch of MediaWiki, is now available. Please try it out and tell us if it works for you. This is a beta release and is not recommended for use in a production environment.
SQLite support has been re-enabled. SQLite is a lightweight serverless database engine. All you need is the client library (which comes with PHP), and a place to put files. It should be great for small personal wikis and resource-limited shared hosts. Please try it out.
A new user preference has been added, allowing the user to specify their gender. This is primarily for the benefit of localising interface text in languages which have gendered second person pronouns, such as Russian. A user's gender is currently only available via the {{GENDER:}} parser function. More applications may be added later.
Full release notes: http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/tags/REL1_15_0RC1/phase3/RELEASE-...
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Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org writes:
A new user preference has been added, allowing the user to specify their gender.
Be sure to also mention how to disable interrogating users' gender. Please implement 'Allow not asking users their gender' https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18761
MY gender is he/him/his. Plumbing fittings have genders. Electrical plugs (male) and sockets (female) have genders. Mechanical parts have genders.
If the system wants to know something biological, like whether I am male or female, the correct thing to ask would be my SEX. Can we please use correct terminology? "Sex" is not a dirty word.
A new user preference has been added, allowing the user to specify their gender.
2009/5/17 Steve VanSlyck s.vanslyck@spamcop.net
Can we please use correct terminology?
You could easily configure this in the MediaWiki namespace if you so wish.
2009/5/17 Steve VanSlyck s.vanslyck@spamcop.net:
MY gender is he/him/his. Plumbing fittings have genders. Electrical plugs (male) and sockets (female) have genders. Mechanical parts have genders.
If the system wants to know something biological, like whether I am male or female, the correct thing to ask would be my SEX. Can we please use correct terminology? "Sex" is not a dirty word.
You are, of course, correct, however in this case "gender" could be considered correct - we are talking about what gender pronouns to use to refer to the person. We should probably say "specify the gender they use" rather than "specify their gender" if we want to be pedantic (which we usually do!).
Steve VanSlyck wrote:
MY gender is he/him/his.
It would be rather cumbersome to label grammatical genders by listing all the words in them, in languages where there are thousands of such words. The terms "male", "female" and "neuter" are conventionally used instead.
If the system wants to know something biological, like whether I am male or female, the correct thing to ask would be my SEX. Can we please use correct terminology? "Sex" is not a dirty word.
The system has no interest in biology. The system wants to know your gender, so that it can use the correct grammatical gender in pronouns referring to you. I thought I made this pretty clear in the announcement.
-- Tim Starling
This system does /not/ want to know my sex. If you're asking a living creature whether it is male or female, you are asking it's sex, not its gender. Living creatures do not come in genders. They come in sexes.
tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Steve VanSlyck wrote: The system has no interest in biology. The system wants to know your gender, so that it can use the correct grammatical gender in pronouns referring to you. I thought I made this pretty clear in the announcement.
Steve VanSlyck wrote:
Living creatures do not come in genders. They come in sexes.
It is perfectly correct, in the English language and in the context of human beings, to refer to this as gender. Sociologically speaking, one's gender is not necessarily the same as one's sex.
Mike
Michael Daly schrieb:
Steve VanSlyck wrote:
Living creatures do not come in genders. They come in sexes.
It is perfectly correct, in the English language and in the context of human beings, to refer to this as gender. Sociologically speaking, one's gender is not necessarily the same as one's sex.
Mike
More to the point, the system is indeed asking about the grammatical gender. That this is connected to biological sex doesn't matter to mediawiki.
-- daniel
Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de writes:
More to the point, the system is indeed asking about the grammatical gender. That this is connected to biological sex doesn't matter to mediawiki.
OK, opened https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18841 to make that clear to the user, and also only ask gender by default if it will be in fact used for the current language.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender (see 2a) http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gender (see 3a)
Steve VanSlyck wrote :
This system does /not/ want to know my sex. If you're asking a living creature whether it is male or female, you are asking it's sex, not its gender. Living creatures do not come in genders. They come in sexes.
tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Steve VanSlyck wrote: The system has no interest in biology. The system wants to know your gender, so that it can use the correct grammatical gender in pronouns referring to you. I thought I made this pretty clear in the announcement.
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org