[Foundation-l] Showing the difference between the sexes

[Austin Hair]

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