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Gender - translatewiki.net

As of version 1.15, MediaWiki supports, in addition to {{PLURAL:}} and {{GRAMMAR:}}, a new magic word: {{GENDER:}}. It is a part a bigger i18n improvement which aims to make MediaWiki fully gender aware in every aspect to address users correctly.

In other words, we have currently two new features for gender.

  1. Users can set their preferred gender in their preferences.
  2. Magic word for specifying alternative wordings for each gender.

Usage of gender preference has/will become more widespread with MediaWiki 1.18 (user namespaces: see below), 1.19 (e.g. logs and lists) and 1.25 (more logs).

User preference

Currently there are three options: unknown (called "unspecified" in user interface), male and female. Of these the unknown is the default for all existing and new users. In the future this feature may be (ab)used to add a so called polite gender, but this is still up for discussion.

Magic word

The magic word {{GENDER:}} works very similar to {{PLURAL:}} and {{GRAMMAR:}}. See the following examples for its syntax. Those assume two genders and a gender-neutral option, which can change in the future – possibly in language dependent ways. In principle it is configurable per language but we might have other genders such as "neuter" as additional parameters.

0. {{GENDER:Username|gender-neutral text for unspecified gender}}
1. {{GENDER:Username|male text|female text|gender-neutral text for unspecified gender}}
2. {{GENDER:|male text|female text|gender-neutral text for unspecified gender}}
3. {{GENDER:[INVALID]|male text|female text|gender-neutral text for unspecified gender}}

Any invalid or non-existent user name will return the default user gender on this wiki – this may be used when the revision user is hidden.

Examples:

If the third parameter is omitted, it will default to the first (male) form. This behaviour can be changed.

The magic word can be used in content and in interface messages, where (any) username is given in a parameter as-is.

In the second feature of the magic word (example 2 above), for interface messages only, the magic word isn't passed any username and uses the gender preference of the current user. Because of the many ways messages are handled in MediaWiki, this works in messages where plural and grammar work, and it may work or not in others, but gender is needed in many other messages where those are not used. Please report in which messages you (want to) use gender functionality but you can't: see instructions below.

Gender use cases

An example from one of the logentry-* messages: Logentry-delete-delete (“$1 {{GENDER:$2|deleted}} page $3”)

Another example, for the second usage, is Cant-block-while-blocked (“You cannot block other users while you are blocked.”).

See more raw examples from core and extensions if you're really curious.

How to use the magic word in translations

This is documentation for translators. For developers: mw:Localisation#Users have grammatical genders.

You'll notice if a message supports gender because the English text will have some part of it wrapped like this: {{GENDER:$1|text for unspecified}}. You'll be able to use the magic word, passing it the username of the relevant user with the numbered parameter.

If the translation is gender-dependent, put the part or the parts of the message which need to change within the magic word, as in the example above: {{GENDER:$1|text for male|text for female|text for unspecified}}. Because most users won't have specified their gender in the preferences and we don't want force them to either, be careful that the translation is as grammatically correct, natural and not offensive as possible for users of any gender (and sensibility), who'll see the text for "unspecified". Also, for the same reason and for additional clarity and ease of adding correct translations, it's better to explicitly use the text for unspecified gender, because it's not semantically correct to assume that MediaWiki will always default to the "text for male", even if it currently does (in general and for your language).

If gender is mandatory, and you don't need it, just use a single dummy value as in the English default.

Testing and more examples

In other languages (check source to see what's the input):

Gender in languages

Gender assumptions can be puzzling

Info: wikipedia:T-V distinction and wikipedia:Grammatical gender.

This section describes characteristics of various languages which are relevant to the use of GENDER. Most of them should be already covered by the current implementation. If you find a message which doesn't have GENDER in the source but needs to know the gender of the user to be correctly translated (i.e. a gender-neutral translation wouldn't be natural/correct), please file a bug or ask for it at Support; the same if your language needs the user and user talk namespace names to respect gender (which is defined elsewhere).

Languages which need more features to correctly address users (not necessarily gender-related) are in the "Unsupported" section: if this applies to your language too, please add or move it to that section and describe its issues and what you'd need for the interface to be correct.

Supported

Note that names of genders are already available for translation in mediawiki messages group as gender-* messages.

Unsupported

Users are the only thing we know the gender of, or what do you mean? – Nike 18:25, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
I was thinking of inflection with regards to the genders of words. Som variables in messages could possible have different genders. --Harald Khan Ճ 18:31, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
Which most often are user supplied input, and thus we cannot know the gender. If there however is preset list of items, something could be done to it. – Nike 18:49, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
  1. Masculine – As per masculine nick or the natural gender.
  2. Female talked about as neuter – As per natural gender of a standard female or some feminine nick.
  3. Unknown gender – Standard and default.
  4. Female talked about as feminine – As per feminine nick or the natural gender of a specialcased female.
  5. Neuter – As per neuter nick or the natural gender, e.g. of a bot program.

External links


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