Hi Ryan,
On Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:49:58 -0700 Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
If people are concerned about sexism in Wikipedia categories they should be drawing attention to edits like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elizabeth_Gillies&curid=19682...
While the rest of the world is moving away from gender-specific job names (like policeman and actress), Wikipedia is moving in the opposite direction. That seems like a much worse problem than categorizing women as women.
One should note that the obsession of having a gender-neutral way to refer to both men and women is a peculiarity of the English language, after several centuries of erosion, and European languages such as French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Semitic languages such as Hebrew or Arabic have compulsory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender (male, female, and sometimes also neuter), including for inanimate objects. So it's not the "rest of the world" - it's only the American English-speaking Feminist-influenced media.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
Ryan Kaldari