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.
-Mark
-- Mark J. Nelson http://www.kmjn.org