Hello, sorry, people, allow me to interrupt your animated discussions: it seems that discussion about gender-neutral language has been going on for quite a while in lots of fields, and still a lot gets written on it in the field of woman studies, and a lot gets discussed in politics: activist groups spend lots of time discussing it instead of overthrowing governments, and the word remains a bad, yet more gender-neutral, place :)
Altough I do think that in this list there are great minds, I would not suggest to aim at globally solving this still generally controversial issue right here right now. Allow me to suggest, with regards to Debian, something like a two-side approach: - from one side, collecting links to sites that gently sensibilize about the issue (like for example the sociology research posteed by Helen in http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2004/08/msg00030.html) - from the other side correcting and sending patches when you notice that some text is especially gender-biased (and pointing to the previously collected links when someone does not see it as a problem). Then, as experience with rewriting goes on, patterns are likely to be seen emerging and maybe some more articulated proposal can come out. In the meantime, more developers have a chance to become aware about it. It may also help taking the issue out of ideology and sneaking it in a wider (for Debian) context of simply have documentation and messages which are nicer and more polite: I tend to file bugs also when error messages blame the user (and even end with (sometimes many) exclamation marks), when manpages have wording like "if you don't like this I don't care: fix it yourself" and so on. Adding "the text is too gender-biased" to this wider range may help in framing it in something that a wider range of people may already care for. Anyway, raise the temperature of the water slowly, or the frog jumps out of the pot. Ciao, Enrico
