Change Details

While I'm aware changing language is not an easy thing to do, saying that we can do nothing because it is too hard, or waiting for someone else to change first is insufficient in my mind. Mediawiki software currently allows gender selection in order for the software to address users or refer to their actions to other users in a grammatically (gendered) way. An example would be "She edits her talk page" "Jared asked you to help with his article draft" Since some languages already have 3 grammatical genders this should be a relatively small change for those languages, for languages where the neuter form is the same as masculine the 3rd options may end up referring to the user as such even in the case where that is incorrect, and we'll have to wait for language to catch up. For english I would propose we use (They/Their/Their)(She/Her/Hers)(He/Him/His) as the pronouns when referring to users actions and Other/Female/Male as system classification only (not shown to the user) Further reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-V_distinction https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1189745 -------------------------- **Version**: 1.23.0 **Severity**: enhancement **See Also**: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53834 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33343 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27744

While I'm aware changing language is not an easy thing to do, saying that we can do nothing because it is too hard, or waiting for someone else to change first is insufficient in my mind. Mediawiki software currently allows gender selection in order for the software to address users or refer to their actions to other users in a grammatically (gendered) way. An example would be "She edits her talk page" "Jared asked you to help with his article draft" Since some languages already have 3 grammatical genders this should be a relatively small change for those languages, for languages where the neuter form is the same as masculine the 3rd options may end up referring to the user as such even in the case where that is incorrect, and we'll have to wait for language to catch up. For english I would propose we use (They/Their/Their)(She/Her/Hers)(He/Him/His) as the pronouns when referring to users actions and Other/Female/Male as system classification only (not shown to the user) Further reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-V_distinction https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1189745 -------------------------- **Version**: 1.23.0 **Severity**: enhancement **See Also**: {T55834} {T35343} {T29744}

While I'm aware changing language is not an easy thing to do, saying that we can do nothing because it is too hard, or waiting for someone else to change first is insufficient in my mind. Mediawiki software currently allows gender selection in order for the software to address users or refer to their actions to other users in a grammatically (gendered) way. An example would be "She edits her talk page" "Jared asked you to help with his article draft" Since some languages already have 3 grammatical genders this should be a relatively small change for those languages, for languages where the neuter form is the same as masculine the 3rd options may end up referring to the user as such even in the case where that is incorrect, and we'll have to wait for language to catch up. For english I would propose we use (They/Their/Their)(She/Her/Hers)(He/Him/His) as the pronouns when referring to users actions and Other/Female/Male as system classification only (not shown to the user) Further reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-V_distinction https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1189745 -------------------------- **Version**: 1.23.0 **Severity**: enhancement **See Also**: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53834{T55834} https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33343{T35343} https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27744{T29744}