Following up on my last post: Providing a localization-specific setting where translators would set the number of gender options so it corresponds to the respective localization's requirements has yet another benefit: It prevents novice translators from introducing inconsistencies when they are translating directly from English.

In T114114#1688573, @Aklapper wrote:

[...] there are some situations where at least German differentiates though the first and third option have the same wording.

I think this is some kind of fallback that took over when Kghbln deleted the page on translatewiki (https://translatewiki.net/wiki/MediaWiki:Yourgender/de-formal). Before he did, the messages were identical. I do not understand how these fallbacks work.

The localizatin de-formal is not an independent localization. Instead, it only contains the messages that differ from plain de. When it not differs, it should fall back to de. Keeping a seperate message in de-formal that does not differ from the correspondent message in de is an unnecessary hassle for future maintenance.

In T61643#1623744, @Nemo_bis wrote:

Which repositories did you check? https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:SearchTranslations might be used to check all of them at once.

In T61643#1613903, @j_mach_wust wrote:

The binary gender + gender-neutral choice is adequate for the English language, but it may be inadequate for other languages. Different languages should allow for different numbers of choices.

It is a typical example of English bias: You take a peculiarity of English grammar (two genders + a gender-neutral way of referring to persons) and then try to apply it to other languages, whether it fits or not.

The binary gender + gender-neutral choice is adequate for the English language, but it may be inadequate for other languages. Different languages should allow for different numbers of choices.

In T61643#1611690, @Nikerabbit wrote:

In T61643#1611685, @j_mach_wust wrote:

I think it is very bad from a usability point of view if a user is offered choices that do not have any effect in the current language.

For example, if I use Finnish interface language in the English Wikipedia, it does make sense for me to be able to set whether I am "he" or "she".

In T61643#1611589, @Nikerabbit wrote:

My justification for the current set is that it should be reasonable sensible even for speakers of languages with no grammatical distinction. We might want to grow it to four by adding inanimate.

In T61643#1611402, @Nemo_bis wrote:

This source is very interesting but quite useless for our purposes

The current system, with a choice between masculine, feminine, and unknown is inadequate for most languages. It shows a confusion between natural gender and grammatical gender. As I understand it, WikiMedia projects have no interest in their users' natural gender – that is what commercial data miners would have. We only care about grammatical gender.

In T29744#1570358, @Nemo_bis wrote:

Practically speaking, why would a language variant not work as an option?

In T29744#1570111, @Nemo_bis wrote:

Most women. Some may prefer to be referred in the traditional way using the neuter grammatical gender.

But you earlier said "the neuter gender is the normal way", I thought "normal" meant most common.

In T29744#1566904, @Nemo_bis wrote:

I imagine a solution where the number of options depends on the language

Our preferences system doesn't provide such a possibility.

In T29744#1565003, @Nemo_bis wrote:

But a problem arises: we only have one preference for users of any language. How to make an option such as neuter work, when it has such a wild variety of meanings across languages?

In T29744#317425, @Purodha wrote:

As said above, Nicknames of neuter grammatical gender may require it, too. This includes, for instance all diminiutives of names such as "Maria" (Mary, feminine) -> "Mariechen" (little Mary, neuter) for all local languages of the western part of the West German continuum from Swiss German over Swabian, Alsation, Palatinean, Ripuarian, (East) Limburgish to Low German (including Westphalian)