What would your (closer to the ideal) {{gender}} magic word do?

Related: bug 27744, and bug 27743

I think this is out of the scope of current gender feature, which is aimed for proper i18n. It is probably relevant for the planned social profile thingie. Untagging i18n.

This was in regards to a discussion that happened off site when we were talking about gender indenity in {software/webapp} packages, We discussed this again not long along and it was basically decided that unless you can have free form boxes that "Male/Female/Undisclosed" were the best options to have and nothing more was really needed.

olivier.beaton wrote:

Do like the Australians. "Male", "Female", "Other". Since it's a non-forced option, keep "Unspecified". "Other" != "Unspecified" really.

You _identify_ as "Other", you never identify as "Unspecified". But someone who doesn't specify never identifies as "Other".

Let the translators slug it out with regards to message/name content.

This is obviously a heated issue, it re-occured in https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30442
about adding the gender dropdown to the signup form.

Is it worth re-opening this issue?

• Bug 44300 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

My bug at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44300 which was just resolved as duplicate of this one provides much more specific and detailed justification for why this should be done, as well as a patch that does it. Please take a look.

Created attachment 11675
MediaWiki patch to add gender option "Other"

Attached:

Okay I didn't realise when I created bug 44300 that this bug already existed. Here is my justification and attached patch (above) copied from that bug.

There are a substantial number of people who view themselves as neither male
nor female, either because they are genderqueer or because they live in a
culture with a traditional third gender, such as the Hirja, the kathoeys, and
Two-Spirit. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderqueer

Although the Gender field is used primarily for grammatical purposes and there
is no universally accepted grammatical convention for non-binary people (for
grammar purposes it could simply be treated the same as "Undisclosed"), I
believe adding a choice of "Other" to the Gender field would help to make
projects based on MediaWiki more welcoming to these people, who otherwise are
compelled to choose "Undisclosed" even if they wish to be open about their
gender.

There is substantial precedent for this on other major websites which also have
an "Other" option for Gender, including but not limited to (from
http://nonbinary.org/wiki/Websites_and_social_networks):

• Google Profile / Google+
• YouTube
• Flickr
• deviantART
• LiveJournal
• MIT's edX

Other major open source software has also added it, such as Drupal. Diaspora
made Gender a free-form text-field. And Australia, New Zealand, and the United
Kingdom allow citizens to list gender as "X" on their passport.

In short, I think adding an "Other" option that is treated grammatically the
same as "Undisclosed" would be a simple, straightforward change that has
considerable precedent and would benefit many users. I've included a patch
against version 1.20.2. Most code did not have to be changed because in the
current code MediaWiki uses gender-neutral wording (if available) whenever the
gender is not male or female.

Translation notes: In the patch I use the "version-other" message which is an
existing translation message that just happens to read "Other". Ideally we
should have a "gender-other" message explicitly for this purpose, which would
merely clone version-other, but I'm not sure how to coordinate that with
translatewiki.net, etc. Advice would be appreciated.

Re-opening for further discussion in light of additional information and patch provided above. I believe the number of sites supporting an "Other" gender has vastly expanded since 2010 when this bug was opened. Please let me know your thoughts.

I don't think anything has changed in the meanwhile and I don't see any additional information.

Please see my extensive comment above (timestamp 2013-01-24 06:45:47 UTC). What has changed since 2010 is that Google, YouTube, Flickr, deviantART, LiveJournal, MIT's edX, Drupal, Diaspora, and numerous other major websites have begun to support an "Other" option for Gender. Major governments in three countries in 2011 and 2012 implemented changes to allow for X indicating "Other" on national passports. My comment above explained this in considerable depth and I am very frustrated that you refuse to even acknowledge these justifications. If MediaWiki does not wish to also add an "Other" Gender option, I would like to understand why it is different from all of these other organizations.

Sure, all social networks should include one such option.

(In reply to comment #12)

I would like to understand why it is different from all of these
other
organizations.

You've obviously not read the discussion at bug 30442 if you ask this question.
Maybe examples are clearer: see bug 31816, there's a patch for it that needs a little work but would avoid confusion like yours and others'.

Okay. I did read that discussion and I am aware that the Gender option is *intended* to be used primarily for internationalization and primarily in non-English languages, but that's not how it's used in practice - users use it to identify genders of other users and a popular gadget at English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PleaseStand/User_info) uses it to place male/female symbols beside usernames.

But I agree that the fix at bug 31816 would also be acceptable and even preferable - it's better for the software not to ask for gender at all if it can avoid it - at least as long as it provides a gender-neutral option in languages that support it.