Last modified: 2009-05-26 15:49:14 UTC
Preferences has a gender chooser. One assumes Chinese is a gender neutral language. However written Chinese has ta1:1.它 2.他 3.她 4.牠 5.祂 depending on if you are talking about it, him, her, it[animal], [god], and ni3: 1.你 2.妳 you [male], you [female]. Therefore Chinese could also take advantage of the Preferences gender item. The perfect thing to give one's wiki the personal touch! Banks, credit card companies often use these forms when writing to their customers, if they know their gender. Examples: 妳必須重新登錄... [Message to a female user.] You[female] must login again; 妳可以寫電子郵件給她 You[female] can send email to _her_. Let's see, the strings affected are /你/, /他/, but not /您/. If the user is gender-unknown, then use the default (male) forms, 他，你.
Closed as INVALID. You should know by now that you can change messages at translatewiki.net. As the UI does not refer to you as an animal or (a) [Gg]od, the current three gender forms suffice.
Just to clarify, you need to put things like {{gender|他|她|它}} in your messages. It will automatically key off the current user's gender (male|female|unspecified). {{gender:username|...}} will work for users other than the current one. These changes should preferably be made at translatewiki.net so that they'll be propagated to all users of the software. If you believe that there are a significant number of Chinese wikis whose users include animals and/or gods, you might be able to override the gender() method in languages/classes/LanguageZh.php and modify the preference options somehow, too. I assume this is not a pressing problem, however.
Yes, gender-male, gender-female in addition to the current gender-unknown are all that are needed. Currently it's a "man/unknown's world": $ perl -nwle 'for(/你|妳|它|他|她/g){$h{$_}++}END{for(sort keys %h){print "$_:$h{$_}"}}' Messages* 他:212 你:483 她:4 它:285 > You should know by now that you can change messages at translatewiki.net. One problem: I am not the best man for the job. Therefore I would like to register this in a bug tracker for others to evaluate. Nobody ever sees what I put on Translatewiki's todo pages and community boards.
Leaving this open; resolve as FIXED when someone's got a chance to do it via translatewiki and it gets into the system.
Fixed with r51027.
