https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44300
Web browser: ---
Bug ID: 44300
Summary: Add "Other" to Gender field in Preferences
Product: MediaWiki
Version: 1.20.2
Hardware: All
OS: All
Status: NEW
Severity: normal
Priority: Unprioritized
Component: User preferences
Assignee: wikibugs-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Reporter: d...@moonflare.com
CC: agarr...@wikimedia.org, wikibugs-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Classification: Unclassified
Mobile Platform: ---
Created attachment 11674
--> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/attachment.cgi?id=11674&action=edit
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.
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