To be absolutely clear: I am not against the feature,
I am just
against applying it to every user that indicated his/her gender
without asking. Up to now (afaik) the male/female setting was only
used for communication *to* the user: that is private. To turn on
suddenly a feature that shows this also explicitely to the outside
world is a whole different thing.
Also, in some languages the difference between male/female maybe exist
if you search hard (like Dutch), but are not commonly used (like
gebruikster - I never ever heard that being used in common
conversations). I am just saying that we should not force these
changes on communities and groups of people without consulting them.
They know their language best and how common the term is, how it comes
across culturally etc. The fact that a term exists doesnt mean we
should use it. I also agree with Austin that it should be even better
to determine it as well on a personal level. But I would make it a two
level choice: first the community should decide to turn it on in the
first place in their wiki, then the user should decide to turn it on
in their individual case.
Lodewijk
2011/2/13 Austin Hair <adhair(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 12:50 PM, Béria Lima
<berialima(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Lodewijk:
Gerard, this wouldn't really help to attract more new female
users.
Could you please tell me why? I can set my preferences to "male" or
"female", but i can't see my "user" page with my real gender. And
yes, that
is a matter of choice, you can say that not every girl will like to be
called "usuária" or Gebruikster" or "Benutzerin", but if you
guys change the
MediaWiki they can have the power to chose. And right now we don't have
that, do we?
I won't speak for Lodewijk, but what I understood him to mean was that
you wouldn't know about the feature until you've already created an
account, so it doesn't *attract* them. One might argue that it helps
*keep* them, but that's a different matter.
Austin:
Like with many European languages, the masculine is the default
and feminine suffixes are added only for emphasis, which is pretty
anti-feminist, and it doesn't help that the feminine forms are related to or
even the same as the diminutive forms.
Anti feminist and partenalist is see several guys deciding what we want or
don't want in our user pages. We are not here to change French or German
grammar, if the feminine is made by adding a sufix, is a local language
problem (btw, in portuguese, the male version is also a "sufix", so is
"usuário / usuária). Again here we are not change grammar, we are only
talking about give girls the "possibility" to be called by the right form in
the MediaWiki system.
Austin: It seems more like an individual
preference to me.
It is a individual preference. But a preference you people don't seems to
want us to decide if we want of not.
I think you misunderstand me. I think it *should* be an individual
preference. What I argue against is making that decision for everyone.
Lodewijk is worried about making that decision for communities whose
linguistic and/or cultural norms might be different; I take it one
step further and say the individual should be able to do that, if it's
to be done at all.
(And as long as we're picking nits: I don't speak Portuguese, but I do
speak Spanish, so I'm guessing that one male user and three female
users are still collectively usuários?)
But back to your first point:
Lodewijk
and Thomas: so why change it to something causing problems all
over the place, not only technical ones?
Why? Maybe to call a girl by her real gender. The problems you both listed
are not real problems. The male version is only used if you don't know the
gender. But all wikimedia know that Sue (for example) is a girl, so why we
still need to see a male word in her "user" page?
This may be important to you in your language, but it may not be
important to others (in fact, they might resent being explicitly
labeled as a woman), if it's even a distinction made in that language.
Austin
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