An English Wikipedia gender neutral policy, similar to the one
developed for Commons, is now under "lively" discussion in a Requests
for Comment started this afternoon. You can read the proposed policy
and join in by adding your viewpoint at:
Shortcut:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fae/RFC_GNL
Full link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/RfC_to_adopt_a…
Some of the comments may be upsetting for some readers. I've actually
been a bit surprised. If it's too much drama for you, go focus on
something more fun.
Thanks,
Fae
Wikimedia LGBT+
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT+
On 5 April 2017 at 11:44, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
*
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Defaulting_to_gende…
Hi,
One of the outcomes from my weekend at 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, 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...
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae