Hi Frances, your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it from a new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems. so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt <[email protected]> To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <[email protected]> Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > Frances Hocutt <[email protected]> writes: > > > > > One change that could address the latter incentive is to change the > > > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical gender is not the > > > default for new users. It could be randomly assigned, and then some men > > as > > > well as some women would have the incentive to set their gender > > preferences. > > > > That's how it currently works, according to the manual, with the default > > gender set to 'unknown': > > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions > > > > I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in effect on > > Wikimedia's own wikis, though. > > > > I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My > understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- > is that an "unknown" user in a language where > personal nouns are gendered will always display > the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of > unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't > need to change his gender in preferences in order > to be described accurately where a female user > would need to set her gender in order to be > described as "Usuaria". Hence, different > incentives, and ones that could be addressed with > different default behavior for an "unknown" user. > > -Frances ------- End of Original Message ------- _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
