https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27744

--- Comment #4 from Purodha Blissenbach <[email protected]> 
2011-08-19 07:36:07 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #2)
> Would this only be used for bots?

No.
As said above, Nicknames of neuter grammatical gender may require it, too. This
includes, for instance all diminiutives of names such as "Maria" (Mary,
feminine) -> "Mariechen" (little Mary, neuter) for all local languages of the
western part of the West German continuum from Swiss German over Swabian,
Alsation, Palatinean, Ripuarian, (East) Limburgish to Low German (including
Westphalian)

Usage is depending on language. It would not be used for bots having Names of
non-neuter grammatical gender in Colognian, e.g.


Off-Topic:
As a side-note: it may be useful to make user "right" or group or status
information available to message handling occasionally. We translate a user
name to the string "the user named 'xyzzy'" in cases of unknown gender, since
articles must be used with names standing alone, and there is no genderless
article. It would of course be both clearer and more informative to use "the
bot named 'xyzzybot'" instead. With some log messages, we would have take care
to keep the status at the time of logging, then.

Another side-note: In order to get nicknaming with grammatically gendered words
right, we would need to know both grammatical and natural gender. For example,
a male boxer nicknamed "the Ape" ("Ape" is feminine as per grammatical gender)
hit his father in law K.O. -> newspaper headline: "Die Aap hät singe
Schwejervatter verkammesölt!" -> Grammatical analysis: "The Ape (feminine) is
referred to with "his" (masculine) -> The nick's article goes the nicknames
grammatical gender while references to the person otherwise go with the natural
gender.

Yet another side note: It is not uncommon, that people use Nicknames that
include articles, such as ":w:de:User:Der Hexer" or ":w:de:User:De Uli". For
languages that require articles to be used with names, we have those articles
in messages files  of course. At least for the langues I know, adding Articles
should be avoided, when names already contain ones.

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