Last modified: 2009-02-09 09:56:53 UTC
Currently the GENDER-parserfunction can be abused to crawel the gender: This: echo "http://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=expandtemplates&text=$(curl -s "http://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=jsonfm&action=query&list=allusers&augroup=sysop" |sed "s/"name": "/{{GENDER:/g"|sed "s/"/|w|m|?}}/g"|grep \{\{GENDER\:.*\|w\|m\|\?\}\}| tr -d '\n\t')" generates an URI for the api to read out the gender of some german admins. I think it would be an easy fix to change the behavior of the template to return only the gender of the current user instead of any other - this would also allow to leave genderspecific notes on a user talk since the gender of the text would be generated at the time of viewing but would close this privacyhole.
Sorry, I see this as invalid. Nobody is forced to specify his or her gender, users can leave/set it being 'Unspecified'! If someone wants to set its account to 'male/female', its a free choice of that user (and actually nothing 'that' private, there are only two possibilities, and mostly users are male anyway ;-) -- the username itself is most often much more revealing. The only thing that should be done is to note (beside the selection menu at [[Special:Preferences]]) that this information will be public!
Indeed, this is intended to be open-visible information like the username, and exists primarily to allow proper grammatical use of the username. Please open a separate bug for cleaning up the preferences UI.
(In reply to comment #2) > Please open a separate bug for cleaning up the preferences UI. > Bug 17311
