Talk:Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Editing for a school project

I (along with 2 others, @LING300DM and @Syntaxemilie) will be providing structural edits and adding new content to this page focusing on the aspects of syntax and gender neutrality with gendered third person (thus not social or political). This is part of a course-based activity of a 3rd year syntax course, and we anticipate having completed our edits by the end of December. We would appreciate any and all constructive comments and suggestions about how to improve the overall quality of this article. Thank you for allowing us to edit in this space.Ling300MW (talk) 21:53, 25 November 2021 (UTC)Ling300MW (talk) 00:07, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

@LING300MW:, welcome. There have been some problems with the edits so far, primarily in the area of WP:Verifiability and sourcing, with the upshot that for the moment, the article has been backed up to the state it was in on 11 November for reasons described in the edit summaries in the WP:Page history. Perhaps you, individually or collectively, can come up with a plan, and outline them here on this page, before going forward with your changes.

As a practical matter, a bare at-sign has no effect; it just puts an at-sign into the text, and nothing more. If you want to alert your classmates to a message, you can use the {{Reply}} template, or {{ping}} them, thus: {{ping|LING300DM|Syntaxemilie}}, which looks like this after you save the page: @LING300DM and Syntaxemilie:, and will notify them of this message. Also pinging @EvergreenFir:.

For specific issues regarding this article, you can either {{Reply}} to this message, create a new section below on a specific topic, or seek assistance at the WP:Tea house or WP:Help desk. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:53, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi everyone, Syntaxemilie here. Thank you for having us. As my group mate @LING300MW: posted, we along with @LING300DM: are part of a university level Syntax course, and our final project involves adding syntactic content to this page.

Our three main goals are as follows:

(1) more clearly differentiate grammatical vs. social/natural gender as it relates to third-person pronouns

(2) add more languages and their third person pronoun patterns, and, to this end, give English its own dedicated section but remove the focus on English in the introduction

(3) introduce/link to syntactic concepts such as agreement and potentially binding theory, to elucidate, from a syntax perspective, some of the "usage issues" previously mentioned in the introduction when it comes to gender neutral pronouns in languages with gender-specified third-person pronouns. This will also involve adding syntax trees to as many languages as possible.

I also want to apologize for making edits without immediately adding citations. As noted in my edit notes, this is an ongoing project, and my plan was to add citations today (within 24 hours). However, these changes were all understandably removed by @Mathglot: due to their violation of Verifiability. I want to thank Mathglot for their dedication to the Wiki guidelines, for being extremely patient with me and taking the time to discuss with me what I'd done wrong. We really want to be a symbiotic part of this page, and hope that everyone can continue to be patient with us as we learn this interface. Please feel free to reach out if something is awry.

Finally, we will only be working on this page until the end of December. If it would be at all possible to allow our (guideline adhering) edits to exist on the page until then, we would appreciate it a ton. It is totally okay if they are removed after this point, if other editors have different visions for how best to format the page; however, it would make moving through our finals season slightly less stressful if this would be possible.

Thank you for your consideration and time! Syntaxemilie (talk) 17:32, 5 December 2021 (PST)

Thanks for your comments. I understand what you are saying, and just to respond to the last bit first: you generally needn't worry about compliant edits remaining on the page, and no special requests are needed on that score. On the flip side, the content of edits by student editors ideally are neither given extra slack, nor extra strict attention by others; they are (or ought to be) treated the same as an edit by any other user, being left in place, modified, or undone as they would be for anyone else, and according to Wikipedia policies and guidelines; to that extent, asking for forbearance until date X doesn't conform to Wikipedia policies—this might be your student project but primarily this is an online encyclopedia, and if there's a disagreement between the needs of the course and the needs of the encyclopedia, the latter take precedence. (However, one thing that *is* different for new editors, is that the behavior towards a student editor by more experienced editors is more forgiving, per WP:DONTBITE.)

Specifically to your points: about adding other languages and placing English in a section: this is very much in line with Wikipedia principles. Although this is the English Wikipedia, it is a global online encyclopedia, and the content should reflect the whole world, and should not be disproportionately weighted towards the English language and topics written about by English sources, so widening coverage to other languages, and giving English the proper amount of attention (even if that means less attention) is supported by Wikipedia principles. The governing principle here is WP:DUE WEIGHT.

In another point, you said, "to elucidate, from a syntax perspective, some of the 'usage issues' previously mentioned in the introduction...". Per WP:LEADFOLLOWSBODY, this should already have been elucidated in the body, or it shouldn't be in the lead at all. However, that's not your problem, that's perhaps an oversight of the editor who added that to the lead; in any case, by backfilling the body, you could be putting that part of the lead on a firm footing, so that would be an improvement. However, as far as your work on the article, please make all the changes you're going to make to the body first, and finish up by adjusting the lead as needed to match its purpose: as a brief summary of the most important points of the article. When you're all done, outside the most basic definition, there shouldn't be anything in the lead that isn't covered in greater detail in the body.

Since you have major plans here, and there are three of you, there is one methodology you may use if you wish, which is to bring major additions here first, to discuss among the three of you and with other editors. I realize you may have collaborative platforms at your disposal at university, but to the extent that this would exclude interested editors here, that is not optimal. Even if you get no feedback here at all, it would be better to expose whatever collaborative discussions you have here, so that others can jump in if they wish. As far as how to do that, you can copy candidate text into a new section, possibly collapsing it if it's long so it doesn't take up tons of vertical space; you can also use a WP:SUBPAGE of this page to keep it all readily available to everyone (not commonly done, but possible), or you could use the sandbox belonging to one of you and talk out changes there, being sure to leave a link here for other editors, so they can find the sandbox page and jump in.

I'm somewhat running out of time to devote to this, and I'm also concerned about being just one volunteer here, and it would probably be helpful if you were to receive feedback from other editors. I'll list this at the Wikipedia Education noticeboard, where hopefully your work here may get additional attention. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:10, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

After a question about this on LING300DM's talk page regarding some subsection headings they added, I've restored their rev. 1058696781‎ of 02:25, 5 December; the way it works, this also restores all the previous revisions, including ones I removed due to sourcing. As noted previously, all the subsequent content is in the page history and can be restored in the same way. I don't have more time for this just now, so please be sure that everything ends up sourced in the end. Emilie, you may get your wish regarding the end of the month after all, as I'm not sure I'll be able to look at this much more before then, although I can still answer specific questions if you have any. Good luck, Mathglot (talk) 06:33, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

I looked at one edit and it is non-compliant and is likely to get significantly changed or removed. Links in headers, external links in the body, unsourced text, original research in examples. There have been follow-up edits that I haven't looked at (and won't) that may already have fixed this. Mathglot (talk) 02:55, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:08, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 January 2020 and 22 April 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Morganromero3.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 21:39, 17 January 2022 (UTC)