[Foundation-l] Showing the difference between the sexes

[The Mono]

So my user page would be at Male:Mono or Man:Mono?

On Sunday, February 13, 2011, Lodewijk <lodewijk at effeietsanders.org> wrote:
> 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 at gmail.com>:
>> On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 12:50 PM, Béria Lima <berialima at 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

-- 
*Mono*
http://enwp.org/m:User:Mono