Talk:Underwear

Why does an article about undergarments need to take a strong stand about gender expression? We have other articles for that topic

So this revert is not the safe, cautious, apolitical approach, in spite of what you might think at first glance. What it does is take a very strong stand: "Boxer briefs are worn by men. Bras are worn by women." It takes a strong stand in saying "Items worn by both sexes include T-shirts... etc" -- there are only two sexes, the article claims. As if it were fact, in Wikipedia's voice. After nobody asked Undergarment to be a diatribe about gender politics.

We have whole articles about sex and gender distinction -- what is biological sex? What is physiological sex, assigned sex? What is gender expression? This article, Undergarment, is about simpler, easier questions. People want to know, what are boxers? What exactly is a bra? What is a camisole? This is an easy article to write, and it doesn't need to be political at all. It's a violation of a number of policies to express opinions as facts, as when using wikivoice to assert there are exactly two sexes and men wear this and women wear that. There are cis men who wear bras. There are cis women who never do. There are people who are not men or women. All subjects for other, more challenging articles.

A fact we can say is that boxers are called "men's wear" by retailers. They sell them in the "men's wear section". Wearing them is a way of expressing male gender. In a mainstream movie a character presenting as female who is wearing boxers is explicitly expressing masculinity through clothing, for whatever reasons -- character development or to be contrarian or because she feels like it. This article does not have to say whether or not we think there are only two sexes or what men or when should or shouldn't wear in order to stand on solid ground and state objective facts: T-shirts, tank tops, and bikini underwear are not associated with a definite gender expression. This is a defensible, verifiable, not at all astonishing thing. Saying " T-shirts, tank tops, and bikini underwear are worn by both sexes is a highly charged, highly political assertion that is outside the scope of an article like this. Encyclopedia readers just want us to tell us about the topic, and give them links to ancillary issues like gender expression.

Inflammatory edit summaries like the the put-down accusing another editor of "translating the article into High Californian, a dialect most of our readers will not be familiar with" suggests a desire to pull this article off topic into social controversies. To suggest "most readers" expect to read that there are only two sexes maybe forgets that most Wikipedia readers, most English speakers and most human beings, are not Americans. In any question, the safe bet is that the rest of the world is more enlightened than the USian least common denominator. Even then, more than half of Americans, across all demographics, are comfortable with gender-neutral pronouns, and if anything, American Wikipedia readers skew younger, more educated and more urban than the whole population. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 02:19, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

I agree that the edit summary was in bad faith and that removing gender-binary-specific language is an easy and non-controversial approach to ensuring that WP articles don't use language that might be problematic. --ZimZalaBim ^talk 02:56, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Engvar

So the WP:RETAIN guideline says "When an English variety's consistent usage has been established in an article, maintain it in the absence of consensus to the contrary" so changing spelling top to bottom without discussion or a compelling reason is already suspect. It's WP:LAME to stir up a non-issue.

"Was started in EngvarB" is not quite to the point. The IP address that began this as a stub in 2002 appears to be in the UK now but there's no evidence of that editor's spelling preference, and anyway, that's not what the guideline says to look for. It says "When no English variety has been established and discussion does not resolve the issue, use the variety found in the first post-stub revision that introduced an identifiable variety." The first revision that might meet that is https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Undergarment&oldid=712081 which has "popularized" not "popularised". If you consider that a stub then the next major expansion is https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Undergarment&oldid=780010 which still uses "color" not "colour". By that point American spelling is pretty well established. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:44, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

Boxer briefs are AKA...

A *lot* of people colloquially refer to boxer briefs currently as just “briefs” - which isn’t grammatically untrue, as sometimes people call bikini briefs simply “briefs”, as well. They are both types of briefs of course. Also, some refer to boxer briefs as “boxers” although that seems less common, and once again may still he linguistically correct. Should this be reflected in the alternate names section for Boxer Briefs? BlackAdvisor (talk) 18:55, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

Citation? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 21:02, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

I know of no documentation of it, otherwise I would have posted about it. BlackAdvisor (talk) 01:08, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

In that case, the answer to your question is that it should be in the alternate names for boxer briefs, provided we have a citation for it. Since we don't, then no, not at this time.--Dennis Bratland (talk) 02:27, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

Bra table

The image

There wasn't an image for a bra in the table, so I added File:Buestenhalter-2.jpg to the table. Was this a good choice? It does represent a fairly common example of a bra shape, and it adequately shows the breast coverage, I would like to say. Qwertyxp2000 (talk | contribs) 22:24, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Requested move 13 January 2023

Undergarment → Underwear – Per WP:COMMONNAME, as "underwear" is much more common based on the Google Ngrams in English generally[1], as well as in American English[2] and British English[3] respectively. Rreagan007 (talk) 05:00, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

• Support per nom. A clear COMMONNAME exists.>>> Extorc.talk 18:59, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

• Support, sure. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:16, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

• Support Blu Moon (talk) 16:34, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
• Support per above. --Srapa (talk) 19:41, 16 January 2023 (UTC)