Talk:Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Beyond she/he: Gender as a text field

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What would the functionality be for other genders?[edit]

Currently the gender setting is only needed for changing grammatical gender (e.g. between "he" and "she", or "usuário" vs. "usuária" vs. neutral "usuário(a)") in various system messages and templates. For other genders, would it default to something gender neutral like "they" or "ze"? Are system messages already gender neutral? I understand why giving more options might be beneficial for people who are registering and identify as intersex or another gender, but I don't understand what the end-result would be. PiRSquared17 (talk) 05:01, 11 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi PiRSquared17, thanks for your questions, but I'm still drafting my post. :) The issue to me isn't about "functionality" as much as it is about the community's openness to diversity and overall approach to new and/or underrepresented users. Also, this data is used in research about Wikipedians, so it does have some implications there. More when I finish, though.--Mssemantics (talk) 17:31, 14 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Even if it is about functionality, facebook still considered that reason enough to change away from a binary. Maximilianklein (talk) 18:31, 14 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Focus rearrange.[edit]

Right now, there is a lot of 'explanation' about the sex/gender distinction before we get to the meaty part which is the proposal for change, and what it would mean. For catchy readability it might be worthwhile to shorten the opening discussion about the sex/gender/binary distinction, and then move to the 'what to change' part more quickly. You could still have all your explanation of the sex/gender distinction as an supplement in a separate section at the end for the interested reader because most of it is textbook-y and so allows for the more advanced reader to skip it, and the interested new reader to come back to it after your point has been made. Maximilianklein (talk) 18:35, 14 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Great suggestions, Maximilianklein. Thanks! --Mssemantics (talk) 20:11, 14 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Mssemantics:, OKcupid experimenting with opening this up will be a hot time to launch this post. Maximilianklein (talk) 05:16, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Making the main point.[edit]

I think your thesis, which as I understand it says "the software enforces our values, since we can control the software let us make it reflect our values". Some ways that might be good to expand on it more are

  1. a follow up with what changed with facebook and (how dragqueens really liked the change, quotes from the execs).
  2. adrressing the difference between having a drop-down menu of 50+ items, versus having a textfield. (that normally is about machine-readablity.
  3. on the topic of machine readability, Wikidata was binary/trinary in what it recorded, but the community did change it, and now is "multi-valued" but not "text-field". My research on this shows that some wikis are about one-tenth-of-one-percent about non-male non-female humans [1], and my latest research shows 6 valid non-male, non-female genders in Wikidata (image right) as of october and it's increasing over time.
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