Talk:Gender/LiquidThreads

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I have read some descriptions and talks and can't find out how I can use the gender of a user talked about by the message, if the user is not the viewing one.

The most prominent example is user's contributions. My language is pl – Polish.

Male case

When I look at the user page User:Nike I can see the link Wkład użytkownika in the side menu (correct).
When I click it, I get to Special:Contributions/Nike,
which has a heading of Wkład użytkownika (correct)
and an explanation below Dla użytkownika Nike (correct).

Female case

When I look at the user page User:Sumanah I can see the link Wkład użytkowniczki in the side menu (correct).
When I click it, I get to Special:Contributions/Sumanah,
which has a heading of Wkład użytkownika (WRONG, should be Wkład użytkowniczki)
and an explanation below Dla użytkowniczki Sumanah (correct).

Here are my questions.

1. How is it done, that messages fit the gender of Nike and Sumanah, i.e. 'owners' or 'subjects' of pages, not mine? I tried to find a /pl message with the female-gender użytkowniczki to learn from, but I failed...
2. Can it be also done in messages like 'USERNAME moved the page' (should read przeniósł for male, and przeniosła for female) or 'undid changes' (usunął or wycofał for male, and usunęła or wycofała for female) or similar in automatic edit descriptions? How can {{GENDER}} refer to proper user?
3. Which string defines the erratic message at Sumanah's contributions listing? How should it be fixed?

CiaPan (talk) 01:14, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

1. GENDER has two usage variants: One referring to the current user viewing the page (used only for interface messages, see e.g. Tog-watchrollback ("Add pages where I have performed a rollback to my watchlist")), written as {{GENDER:|m|f|n}} (without the username). An the other one where the user, whose gender should discriminate, is specified explicitly (e.g. savedrights ("The user groups of {{GENDER:$1|$1}} have been saved.")), written as {{GENDER:username|m|f|n}}. Obviously, the username is usually passed as a parameter to the respective message, e.g. {{GENDER:$1|m|f|n}}.
2. Of course it can, USERNAME {{GENDER:USERNAME|przeniósł|przeniosła}} (more specifically, usually something like$1 {{GENDER:$1|przeniósł|przeniosła}}, if the $1 variable contains the username).
3. If you want to learn which message causes something to be displayed, append ?uselang=qqx to the page URL, see the FAQ. In this case, viewing Special:Contributions/Sumanah?uselang=qqx shows the heading of the page is defined by contributions ("User contributions").

The problem at (3) is that the message (both in Polish and English) uses the parameter $1, but it’s not passed to the message. This is a software bug, either the parameter should be passed, or—if that’s impossible for some reason—at least the parameter should be removed from the English message.

In my opinion Gender magic word should work in Help namespace too. I created a task on Phabricator.

CLOSED This issue is closed by Nemo_bis

The Malay language doesn't have separate pronouns or any other word inflections for different genders. Plural support is also not needed at all. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_grammar#Gender and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_grammar#Number

See Plural and Gender: you can write something like {{GENDER:$1|only translation}} etc., isn't this good enough?

But even if it's useless at all? Then how about "{{GENDER:$1|his|her|their}}" (well, in Chinese it's translated into "{{GENDER:$1|他|她|他们 (hans) / 他們 (hant)}}", and it's the ONLY usage of GENDER in Chinese).

Are there any news about this? First tag works just fine (the one with the username included), but the second one for the interface messages doesn't. I sent an image so I can check this out and instead of a male form, it displayed me unspecified form (see this). And yes, I set my preferences to a male gender.
Edit: I just found this page which has an additional tag for gender use. I think this should be included everywhere where needed.

It really depends on the message if it works or not, and the only way to make sure it works is by testing it in the real (not previewing here) or asking a developer to look at it. That's why we need reports of messages where you want to use gender.

Sure, I understand. I am reviewing all the MediaWiki messages these days, translating untranslated and editing existing messages.

I will definitely note the messages which needs gender use. Thank you for the answer.

Here is the list of some interface messages which need gender use: http://tinypaste.com/8660f

You should add an additional tag for the user who did those actions (this applies to the messages in All public logs, which is 90% of the links above).

Thanks. This has already been registered as an issue: bugzilla:24156: Messages of log entries should support GENDER.

I see this issue is about eight months old. Are you going to do something about it soon? It's pretty important thing to do.

I'm sorry it has not been fixed and I agree it's important. However the task is quite a big and I don't have time for such things now.

Here's my understanding of the current situation, courtesy Mark Hershberger:

1. The only new support for gender in 1.18 is the User: namespace. I've asked Sam Reedy to configure Test2 so that you can see this. If you specify your gender in Special:Preferences you'll see that redirects your User page. For example, I've set my gender on test2 to "male" and so when you visit http://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MarkAHershberger, you'll be redirected to "Male user:MarkAHershberger" and see the result in the URL/Location bar.

2. By looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MarkAHershberger/Gender_example you can find examples of support that 1.17 already had for gender. You can use these for regression testing.

3. There is no way to display different text based on the Gender of the page viewer. Purodha Blissenbach has suggested on http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Gender (which is a good page to read for more information on this issue) that redirects might be used on Help pages where this would be useful.

All correct.

Can anyone please explain how can use this to get the gender of current user looking at a page? If not a in a general page, it would be enough to get for messages. I tried some combinations but nothing worked - it always gave me the male form.

You can't. The unspecified form {{GENDER|a|b|c}} only works in (some, not all) interface messages.

So what needs to be done to make it useful for Hebrew wikis?

The most acute problem for Hebrew is, like for the Slavic languages, the logs, which say "User:FemaleAdmin deleted File:Example.jpg", where deleted should be feminine (see Bug 24156). It's acute, because there are no linguistics tricks that can avoid it, but otherwise it is rather small, and if i'm not mistaken, it can be solved by passing the username as a parameter (correct me if i'm wrong).

The bigger problem is addressing the current user in the second person. We usually avoid by using the plural, but it's not quite natural. It is less acute, but it's bigger, which spans many, many more messages.

So, what can be done? If there's no automatic way to know the current user name, can it be passed as a parameter? This may work, but then the developers will have to a lot of tedious work. But i may be missing something here.

Logs are an issue on their own waiting for someone to pick up the work: bugzilla:24620.