Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it from a new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats
best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes:
One change that could address the latter incentive is
to change the
defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical
gender is not the
default for new users. It could be randomly assigned,
and then some men
as
well as some women would have the incentive to set
their gender
preferences.
That's how it currently works, according to the manual,
with the default
gender set to 'unknown': http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in
effect on
Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- is that an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't need to change his gender in preferences in order to be described accurately where a female user would need to set her gender in order to be described as "Usuaria". Hence, different incentives, and ones that could be addressed with different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
------- End of Original Message -------