Talk:Community Wishlist/W504

Oppose

Sorry but I have to oppose this one:

• Setting the gender is not needed or not any significant benefit
• Messages are grammatically correct but improving them further based on the gender of the user is not a noticeable / significant improvement
• There's lots of more important and impactful settings the user could be asked about so if the user is asked about this or forwarded to that particular setting, there's like 50 more impactful ones that should be shown as well with no reason to prioritize this one
• It only complicates the registration / the process to get started, which should be as simple and fast as possible – e.g. one could also think about not requiring a username and password at first but just the email and then let users change / configure things later to increase contributors, not the other way around

Prototyperspective (talk) 10:51, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

This concern mainly reflects the perspective of English and other non-gendered languages and does not generalize across Wikimedia projects. In many widely used languages (e.g. Russian, Polish, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew), system messages addressed to the user are grammatically gendered, and without this setting the interface defaults to masculine forms, which means women are routinely addressed incorrectly by design. In 2026, this is no longer acceptable UX and cannot be dismissed as an insignificant improvement: it is about basic linguistic correctness and respectful communication, not personalization. The setting already exists, would remain optional, and adding it at registration does not meaningfully increase friction, while delaying it ensures most users never discover it and remain misaddressed indefinitely. This is a minimal, low-cost change with an immediate and movement-wide impact on onboarding quality and inclusivity. Iniquity (talk) 11:27, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

• It may be good to also clarify this in the wish text. While point 2 doesn't apply to some other languages Wikipedias, I don't think this affects the other points or just point 1 very very weakly because in some languages the texts may then be easier to read and shorter.
• I don't think women are "addressed incorrectly by design" – the masculine form in many languages is also used for the neutral form which isn't much of a problem...e.g. the user = der Nutzer / the human = der Mensch in German where der is the masculine article.
• "no longer acceptable UX" false. It's widely used and there is no problem with this. Moreover, it's not about UX at all – UX refers to user experience User experience is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system, or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. It is not disrespectful and is not incorrect. Moreover, I think the texts often use nonmasculine neutral texts anyway such as "he/she" as well as "they" would be when referring to a user of unknown gender. The user can easily go to the preferences and specify their gender also. with an immediate and movement-wide impact It has no tangible impact other than making the set up longer, reducing contributors counts, and unfairly surfacing one preference when there are about 50 that are more impactful that are not surfaced.

Prototyperspective (talk) 16:09, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

If there indeed are some UI messages that are incorrect because the gender is unknown I suggest that these messages are edited where if you don't have the permissions to do so, one could (a) code issue(s) for these edits. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:18, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, but in order to understand whether this discussion is still constructive, I need to clarify one point. Am I understanding you correctly that your position is that addressing women using masculine grammatical forms is acceptable, even when the system already provides a way to avoid this and address users correctly?

While masculine forms can function as generic in some languages (e.g. German “der Nutzer”), this is not universal, and even in those languages the generic masculine is increasingly avoided in user-facing interfaces. More importantly, in many languages (e.g. Slavic and Romance languages), past tense and participle forms cannot be neutral and defaulting to masculine is a technical compromise, not a neutral choice. Iniquity (talk) 17:08, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

If you do not see the 4 points above as constructive I can't help you. I don't know about all the languages but I know that at least in some there is established and widespread use and acceptance of generic masculinum (de:Generisches Maskulinum) regardless of how incorrect you think it is (and how it is in other languages that doesn't affect the other points much and can be solved by adjusting the texts as suggested earlier). Prototyperspective (talk) 17:23, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

I’m not questioning the constructiveness of your four points in general. What I am questioning is the applicability of the proposed solution across languages. If you explicitly state that you are not familiar with how grammatical gender and localization work in many languages, then it is unclear why you insist on solutions that are known to be non-viable for a large number of Wikimedia language communities. Generic masculine may be established and acceptable in some languages (such as German), but that does not generalize, and “adjusting the texts” is not a workable option where grammatical agreement is unavoidable. In those cases, the issue cannot be solved at the text level without knowing the user’s gender, which is precisely the problem being discussed. Iniquity (talk) 17:27, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

How do other websites in these languages handle that? Secondly, I still doubt it for even those languages that one can't write like "YouM/YouF please readM/readF policies." It may make the sentence longer and cluttered but I doubt it can't be more readily solved like so and concrete examples of where it can't be solved like that or why you think this is not a sufficient solution would be good to add to the wish content imo. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:45, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

How do other websites in these languages handle that?
Other large platforms operating in these languages generally solve this in one of three ways:

• They infer or ask for gender early (explicitly or implicitly) and use it for localization
• They aggressively avoid second-person constructions altogether (rewriting large parts of MediaWiki UI is impossible).
• They accept grammatically incorrect or awkward language, usually as a legacy compromise.

Wikimedia already chose option (1) at the platform level by implementing the {{GENDER:}} system in MediaWiki. The open question is when that information is reliably provided, not whether it should exist.

It is also worth noting that MediaWiki is one of the very few platforms on the internet that actively supports more than 400 languages, which makes scalability and proper localization a core requirement rather than an edge case.

I still doubt it for even those languages that one can't write like "YouM/YouF please readM/readF policies.
Regarding the proposed workaround (“YouM/YouF”, “readM/readF”, etc.): this approach is not used at scale on major platforms, and it is not used in Wikimedia localisation. Iniquity (talk) 18:01, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

concrete examples of where it can't be solved like that or why you think this is not a sufficient solution would be good to add to the wish content imo.
Check https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special%3ATranslate&group=core&language=ru&filter=&action=translate with {{GENDER:}} filter. Iniquity (talk) 18:19, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Ask for gender or not depending on the language

Since the relevance of asking varies by language, the user’s gender could be asked only when it is linguistically relevant to the language used at registration (in particular, it wouldn't be asked for english speakers). Escargot bleu (talk) 22:57, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Agree and I think this should be made clear in the wish. English isn't the only language of that kind; it also shouldn't be asked for German. (I'm still not entirely convinced about the need/impact of this but am neutral on whether that setting is e.g. displayed/linked next to gender-related texts for the languages where one of the three workaround Iniquity described are resorted to when gender is not specified.) Prototyperspective (talk) 11:19, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

I agree that, if implemented at all, it should be restricted to cases where knowing a user's pronoun preferences is relevant for a more linguistically welcoming experience. I don't have the cultural expertise to know which languages those would be, but I feel strongly that English is not one of them. On en-wiki I really appreciated not being asked for personal information, and that I had a way to optionally put in a pronoun preference later in my settings when I decided I wanted one; it was a uniquely positive experience for me. LEvalyn (talk) 22:06, 14 March 2026 (UTC)

Update from WMF

Thank you for submitting your wish! We are working with internal stakeholders to figure out next steps, such as feasibility and prioritization. We’ll keep you posted about it. MikeZ-WMF (talk) 10:04, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Iniquity @LEvalyn @Prototyperspective @Escargot bleu

Thank you for sharing your perspectives here! @Escargot bleu also had a parallel thread with the relevant product manager (@KStoller-WMF) about this in the context of Account Creation Experiments, which everyone else is also welcome to comment on.

For now the team is working on ways to add onboarding questions that allow you to further personalize your account (for example, the Welcome Survey - see enwiki ), which could be a more lightweight way to select this preference without introducing additional friction during sign up as mentioned by others. We'll update this in the future if the strategy changes. MikeZ-WMF (talk) 11:28, 18 June 2026 (UTC)