Sunday, February 27, 2011

Say hello to the magic of gender in #Wikipedia

The notion I had about #privacy was that it should not be possible to get information about a person like his or her gender. I was wrong; it says clearly in the preferences that gender is observable.

It is even better, "gender" is a magic word that allows you to make a sentence and will retrieve the gender of a user and, it will allow insert one of three strings depending on the result.

Hello {{gender:Maria|Mr|Mrs|whatever}} [[User:Maria|]], gender is a ''magic word''. Greetings, {{gender:GerardM|Mr|Mrs|whatever}} [[User:GerardM|]]


This same mechanism is used in the localisation of MediaWiki at translatewiki.net with the exception that the user is the logged in user by default and does not need to be identified.

What this clearly demonstrates is that setting your gender is observable and it can be used in templates and in texts wherever it is appropriate.
Thanks,
       GerardM

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