MediaWiki patch to add gender option "Other"
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.
Version: 1.20.x
Severity: normal
Attached: