[Foundation-l] Showing the difference between the sexes

[Lodewijk]

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
>
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