Gender support for instances of username (gsw)
Hi
I have recently been working on Wikimedia translations into Alemannic (gsw). I have stumbled upon a few instances where a username is being passed to the message, but there is no indication that it can be checked for gender. An example is MediaWiki:Echo-email-batch-body-intro-daily/gsw.
Should I file bug reports to make these messages gender-sensitive, or is it just an ommission in the documentation? I assumed the latter and used the magical word {{GENDER:}}, but I am not sure whether this is correct or, in the worst case, harmful.
For Alemannic, basically, every instance of a username needs to be checked for gender. Names take definite articles (like in all Upper German varieties). Also, the names can occur with three different genders, female, male, or neuter. Strange though it may seem, neuter is traditionally used when referring to girls and young women in many Alemannic varieties. I can easily provide references from relevant linguistic sources if that is required.
J. 'mach' wust (talk) 14:47, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
Individual messages which need gender support and don't have the GENDER keyword should be reported: maybe GENDER works already (and that's useful to note in /qqq), but it needs to be properly conveyed to translators.
As for neuter, we had a request for neuter from another German language, please add your use case/information there.
Many thanks for pointing me to the right places.
With regard to reporting: There are some messages like MediaWiki:Notification-edit-talk-page-email-batch-body2 where GENDER is already being used, but there is no mention of it in /qqq. If I understand you correctly, there is no need for reporting such a message on the Wikimedia Phabricator and I can just edit the /qqq by myself. Is that correct?