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