https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41484

--- Comment #29 from Trevor Parscal <[email protected]> ---
Just adding my 2 cents in here.

The icon was chosen, by me, in 2009. It was the standard generic user icon in
the Tango icon library, which we were embracing at the time.

I agree with some of comments here that using stereotypes to make the icon more
gender specific is going to be offensive. Should we also assume their
nationality based on their location or language and adjust the icon
accordingly? Obviously this is going to be a nightmare. Besides, none of this
would any value.

The use of the icon was inherited from Monobook. As many people are aware,
Vector was more of a riff on Monobook than a new skin. At the time especially,
Monobook had become this iconic skin that everyone was so attached to after
years of staring at it, that every tiny adjustment we proposed was highly
controversial.

Do we still need the icon? I think so. It's actually one of the more reasonable
uses of iconography - which we use very selectively in Vector - because it
is...

1. Identifiable (must be obvious what it means)
2. Necessary (icons for the sake of icons are bad)
3. Important (icons for obscure tasks bring attention to the wrong things)

I say we keep it, and when we make all the other icons monochrome (going along
with work like Agora and VisualEditor) it should become a silhouette.

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