+1 for gender neutral pronouns, and I agree with Galen; we all have our own priorities, as well as our own limitations and capabilities, when it comes to contributing to Koha. While I think it's the prerogative of the QA team and Release Manager to prioritize certain patches, I don't see any problems with people contributing patches regardless of their perceived importance.
As for gender neutral pronouns, users of modern online English interfaces may notice that websites like Facebook are already doing this on their front-end. Instead of "X changed his status" or "X changed her status", it's now "X changed their status" - at least in cases where gender isn't specified. I graduated with a master's degree less than 5 years ago, and the norm was to use "they" instead of "him/her" or "him or her" in academic writing. As others have noted on Bugzilla, "him or her" or "him/her" is heavy to read and non-inclusive. The idea of using "her" instead of "him" (as Phillippe suggested) was used by some writers in the early 21st century, but it's mostly fallen out of fashion. While it was politically significant, it's not inclusive/accurate. While some people might think "they" is overly politically correct, it seems perfectly logical to me. It's more concise, inclusive, and accurate. Consider the following scenario. Your child goes to the doctor as they are feeling ill. They come home and you say, "you've been to the doctor? What was their medical opinion?". You wouldn't say "What was her medical opinion?" or "What was his medical opinion?" as you don't know the gender of the doctor. (Also you are being inclusive of trans and non-gender conforming people as well.) (Note also that I didn't specify the gender of your child either, as I don't know the gender of your child, so I used "they" there too.) I can understand that this might be difficult to understand for people whose primary languages are heavily gendered like French and Spanish. While those languages have engaged with the concept of gender neutrality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatic al_gender), I think pronouns haven't quite been worked out. I've seen proposals for new gender neutral pronouns in both languages, but I don't think they're widely recognized, while "they" is quite widely used in contemporary English. If I understand Bug 18432 correctly, the change is just to code comments, which are in English anyway, so I don't think there is the problem of gender neutrality in other languages. If we're using gender neutral pronouns in templates/code, I can see that becoming more difficult. David Cook Systems Librarian Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Direct: 02 8005 0595 > -----Original Message----- > From: koha-devel-boun...@lists.koha-community.org [mailto:koha-devel- > boun...@lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of Galen Charlton > Sent: Friday, 21 April 2017 1:15 AM > To: Paul Poulain <paul.poul...@biblibre.com> > Cc: koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org > Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] Gender-neutral pronouns > > Hi, > > On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 10:59 AM, Paul Poulain <paul.poul...@biblibre.com> > wrote: > > I'll probably be poorly ranked here, but in my opinion there are more > > important things to fix in Koha... (randomly chosen: clean the wiki > > from severely outdated pages, test one of the 205 patches waiting for > > sign-off, improve documentation, investigate why we have 10 blockers > > or critical bugs open -without a patch-, one of them BZ14731 being > > >1yr old) > > Well, folks remain free to set their personal priorities in how they choose to > contribute to Koha. Trying to be more inclusive by measuring our words more > carefully does not preclude working on bugs or updating the wiki... and may > also result in more potential contributors deciding to stick around and pitch in. > > Regards, > > Galen > -- > Galen Charlton > Infrastructure and Added Services Manager Equinox Open Library Initiative > phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) > email: g...@equinoxinitiative.org > web: https://equinoxInitiative.org > direct: +1 770-709-5581 > cell: +1 404-984-4366 > _______________________________________________ > Koha-devel mailing list > Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org > http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel > website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ > bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/ _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/