On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 8:30 AM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Although it’s not a proposal to do research per se, I think this is a proposal that researchers need to support as it’s pretty fundamental:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Face_new_editors_with_the_pos... .. ... It should be made clear that this information is for WMF's statistical/research purposes and not disclosed to others. ...
The gender user preference, which that proposal is currently about, is public data. Under the gender preference is the following small print (English; other languages should be similar)
"Setting this preference is optional. The software uses its value to address you and to mention you to others using the appropriate grammatical gender. This information will be public."
It is exposed via User page names and the 'gender' parser functions (see 'gender' on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words)
Maybe we would see more people filling it in if there was an option for it to be non-public. But then the software is collecting information which is not used by the software.
Or put a different way: what ways can the MediaWiki software benefit from a non-public gender setting?