Template talk:Gender

Is this a joke?
Everyone knows that Jimbo Wales is a guy - and the template says "he/she". But "Gurch" and "X!" are not generally known as males, and the template says "he". Is this template a joke, or is it just an utterly bad documentation? &mdash; Sebastian 23:07, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
 * No, it reads the gender preferences set at Special:Preferences which is publicly available, it comes out he/she for Jimbo because he has not specified his gender. I have still found it very useful however. Camaron · Christopher · talk 16:23, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
 * It has been changed to use dummy usernames now.  — Soap  —  18:19, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Doesn't work in deep subpages
This template doesn't work desirably in subpages that are two or more levels deep (e.g., User:Richwales/Tabs/Userboxes). If BASEPAGENAME is supplied as the first parameter in this case, it gets stripped to (e.g.) Richwales/Tabs (since BASEPAGENAME strips only one subpage) — a result which isn't a user name and therefore doesn't correspond to any gender. I can work around this by wrapping the parameter in   (see User:Richwales/Userboxes/en-us-N* for an example), but it seems to me that  really ought to be used in the Gender template itself, instead of having to be invoked in every use of the template. Comments? — Rich wales 22:14, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Singular they
Update: Pinging SebastianHelm (Sebastian), Camaron and Soap :   Goldenshimmer recently changed the template to use singular they, which comes on the heels of a WP:LGBT discussion (involving Lava03, myself, The Anome, Maplestrip and Funcrunch) about use of singular they. Goldenshimmer did the same for Template:Gender/doc. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 04:30, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Pinging CT Cooper in case the Camaron Doppelgänger no longer works. I also struck through Soap's name above since I forgot that he is banned. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 04:33, 7 April 2016 (UTC)


 * I took the liberty to move this to a different section, as this doesn't have anything to do with the six-year-old discussion on how the template functions.
 * For what it's worth, I'm an advocate of the singular they and already consider it standard English usage. This is particularly so when talking about an unclear subject ("The mysterious person took off their shoes"), but it's definitely an option for users ("Sam took off their shoes"). Seeing as this template is only used on talk pages, it does not have to apply to Wikipedia guidelines. Regardless, I understand that this is a difficult topic, as pronouns can be hard to agree upon. ~ Mable ( chat ) 09:59, 7 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Flyer 22, for pinging me. Those who want to use singular they can also use gender-neutral, so it's somewhat redundant to change this template to "he/she". gender-neutral contains "they" (and inflections) in a way that allows them to be read as "ey". Precisely for the reasons of ambiguity you cite (which however are not well covered in the singular they article) – I had been an advocate for using a new set of pronouns, and in 2006 I picked the set that was then called "Spivak (new)", but now goes by the name Elverson. Either way, they did not take off; a linguist I asked about her preference among the pronoun sets said "we lost that battle". Sad as that is, it offers new possibilities. We could change gender-neutral to display the "th" in black font and then restore the "he/she" here, or, if we decide here that "he/she" has also gone out of fasion, we could merge the two templates. &mdash; Sebastian 22:22, 7 April 2016 (UTC)
 * How about adding another optional parameter that allows a user to provide the ungendered form according to personal preference, and for which they (or whatever) is just the default value? For example something like  would emit he or she. This would make the template more convenient both for the ‘linguistic conservatives’ who‘d rather not use singular they and for the ‘pioneers’ who advocate e, SHe, xe, or some other set of neologisms.—Odysseus 1 4 7  9  07:22, 15 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Decent suggestion. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 06:14, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Annoying bug
Anyone got an idea how to fix this template to stop reporting the wrong case when the first parameter does not resolve? This issue makes it impossible to use accurately for examples. I.e.: Something's making it "short-circuit" back to the default nominative/subjective case. I don't know anything about the  parser function and what can be done to make it behave better. Seems there should be a way to feed it some kind of default value, that varies by object value, when 1 doesn't check out, that makes to produce gender-neutral output that corresponds to the selected object.
 * correctly produces "him":
 * should produce "them" for object, but instead produces "they":

For an example of where this barfs in a real template, see  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ &gt;ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ&lt;  19:19, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
 * The logic is fine, it was just a typo in the "object" case. Should be fixed in this edit. Anomie⚔ 00:38, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Yay! Anomie has better eyes (or glasses) than me.  :-)   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ &gt;ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ&lt;  05:10, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Singular they in the reflexive case
Should we use "themselves" or "themself"? Personally, I lean towards the latter, for the same reason "yourself" is considered correct grammar even though "you" was originally the plural of "thou". It's also apparently recommended by the Chicago Manual of Style. Anomie⚔ 00:43, 18 December 2017 (UTC)


 * SMcCandlish, one of our very active WP:MOS editors, likely has an opinion on that. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 00:49, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Not much of one. Usage is in flux on this, and may vary regionally. There are a lot of interesting things going on in the language. Probably worth looking at more than Chicago on this and seeing if there's a trend. I agree themself is more logical, but I'm not certain that it has more currency; Googling it turns up a lot of debate (not just in random Internet forums) . There may be a non-regional divide in usage communities (e.g. gender studies academics versus journalists, or whatever).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ &gt;ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ&lt;  05:33, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I've implemented and documented an option for this (and cleaned up the docs in the process). We can probably easily support it with an option in various templates (like ) that work on parameter data rather than by getting user info from MediaWiki. I'm skeptical about changing the default in any of them from themselves to themself without some kind of "most modern style guides say ..." rationale.  (I'm usually the one who provides one for something, but I don't have time right now to go such a sourcing run on something this minor. Maybe some of this work has already been done and it' already covered at Singular they? (I haven't looked lately.)  If not, it should be, since it's a usage conflict and can probably be well-documented.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ &gt;ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ&lt;  11:14, 18 December 2017 (UTC)