In my observation, German female editors tend to (or not care of) using Benutzer (user as male) to mention themselves in their writing, but French editors seem to stick to call themselves Utilisatrice (user as female).
Latin Wikipedia has a female option on their {{welcome}} equivalent, but it seems sometimes to be used without minding in which sex the user being welcomed is.
Besides that, in feminism it has been pointed out addressing explicitly someone female as such when their gender/sex is not a matter is a sort of discrimination (the earliest mention was iirc Barkoff 1968 in a study of English linguistic). It's no simple question if we should make it clear whether a user is male or female.
On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 5:40 AM, Lena ... lenarohrbach@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, this is Lena, Germany. I'm one of those women Wikimedia would like to encourage (I'm interested, but I haven't edited much more than a few typing errors anonymously). Like Béria, I don't think male words will push people out of Wikipedia - that is, they won't push out the women that are already in. But I do think that female words could encourage some of the women who are still hesitating and unsure. It says: "Yes, we're talking to you!" I don't feel unwanted if someone doesn't use the female words. But I don't feel wanted either. I someone does use female words, it feels like it's more directed to me. (I don't want it to work like that, by the way. But unfortunately, it does work like this for me.) all best, Lena
On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 8:22 PM, Béria Lima beria.lima@wikimedia.pt wrote:
Well, particulary, I have no problem with the male "Usuário" (in portuguese). And sincerely, I don't think the fact of see a male word will push me out Wikippedia. We are quite used to use a male word in portuguese when we don't know the gender of someone, but yes, would be nice to see a "Usuária" in my page :D _____ Béria Lima Wikimedia Portugal (351) 963 953 042
Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. É isso o que estamos a fazer.
2011/2/5 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org
Hi,
one example of discrimination in the software we use (MediaWiki) is the way user pages are designated and displayed. If you create a user profile, your page is called "User:Yournamehere". This works fine in English, but in some other languages, the default for "User:" is the male translation. Some have aliases (but always display the male expression), others don't.
There's actually a bug report about this for Polish: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17160
I am wondering:
- Are there people on this list affected by this? If so, how do you
feel about it - how important would it be to you to get this fixed?
- Are there other examples of discriminatory language (or interfaces)
that are built into the software?
Thanks, Erik
-- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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