I definitely support using gender-neutral language wherever possible, especially since I'm agender and prefer being addressed with "singular they" pronouns. I'll support your proposal on Commons.
- Pax aka Funcrunch
On 4/5/17 5:54 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
Writing should, indeed, be gender-neutral when the gender is not known. But when the gender is known, it is possible in MediaWiki software to write messaging according to the indicated gender.
Note that in the English grammar it is needed relatively rarely in the first place. It is relevant for few things other than "he" and "she". Latina/Latino has a gender, but it is the exception rather than the norm. In many, many other languages, it is needed far more frequently: for "you" ("Are you sure?"), for imperative verbs ("Upload a media file"), for all past tense verbs ("Jenny thanked you for your edit"), and in other cases. MediaWiki and Facebook are the only pieces of software I know (there may be others) that support adding masculine, feminine, and unknown-gender forms. (In case you wondered, the default is "unknown".)
There are some cases when this software feature cannot be used, but very frequently it can, and should be used.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2017-04-05 13:52 GMT+03:00 Fæ faewik@gmail.com:
Defaulting_to_gender_neutral_language_in_the_Commons_namespace
Hi,
One of the unplanned outcomes from the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin, was that the various discussions over /feeling/ more welcoming in our language presumptions for non-male contributors made me think about taking some practical steps on my home project. Commons is lucky that having a standard policy language of English makes it easier to use neutral gender in policy statements. I'm taking that further by proposing that we stick to a neutral gender for all our policies and help pages. In practice this means that policies avoid using "he or she" and stick to "they" or avoid using a pronoun at all. I'm hoping that the outcome will feel like a much more natural space for people like me that prefer to stay gender neutral, possibly give a slightly safer feeling to the project by the very act of making the effort, as well as avoiding an over-emphasis on binary gender when it's pretty easy to simply avoid it.
Comments are welcome on the specific proposal above, or you may have ideas for other local projects to do something similar. I'm aware that this is much more difficult to make progress on in languages such as German or Spanish that have a presumption of male/female gender within their vocabulary, so any cases of on-project initiatives in non-English would be especially interesting. Solving these challenges is an opportunity to make our projects a leader on gender neutrality, for example getting a Wikimedia based consensus to adopt terms like "Latinx".[1]
Links:
- "Latinx" is a reaction against using gendered forms Latino and
Latina, in a language that has no neutral gender. This is becoming an accepted practice in related forums and academic publications. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-people-are-using- the-term-latinx_us_57753328e4b0cc0fa136a159
Thanks, Fae Wikimedia LGBT+ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT/Portal -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae