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Rivers Solomon. Is the use of these "fae" pronouns according to policy? Equinox ◑ 20:11, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- Since the article's subject also lists "they/their" as acceptable - which are actual English-language pronouns - I think it was a mistake to switch to neopronouns. Newimpartial ( talk) 20:15, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- As it will be a completely new construction to most readers, we at least need a note on its first usage, not just the prose of the first sentence in "Personal life". WP:ASTONISH might be the most relevant part of policy for choosing between "they/them" and "fae/faer", and it would lean us towards the former. I can guarantee some readers will be confused about whether "Fae" (used capitalised at the start of some sentences in the article) is Solomon's surname, or some sort of pen name. Remember that almost no readers read most articles top to bottom, or even scan the page from top to bottom. However, we don't sacrifice correctness or precision of language (e.g. "one die, two dice") even when it can cause reader confusion, and maybe Solomon has indicated that fae prefer "fae/faer". — Bilorv ( talk) 20:35, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- No it is not, and I have fixed it. To be frank, language exists to communicate; there must be some limits to the pronouns that we can expected to use for a person. For example, there was this incident where someone at one point said something about being called "tree". There was also another person who put "beep/bop/boop" in her Twitter profile at one time. Both of these people are equally evidently cisgender, but one was criticized for ridiculing transgender people, while the other had an army of Twitter fans earnestly policing others to use the neopronoun, and making edits and edit requests here. Go figure. Blaire White, a trans woman, has in her Twitter profile "Pronouns: that/bitch". Now, a reasonable person would understand that is not meant to be taken seriously - especially if you know White's viewpoints.
- Clearly, the line has to be drawn somewere. And the clearly sensible cutoff is that we only use pronouns that are recognized as such by English-language dictionaries. Anything else is WP:RGW language reform attempts that are not appropriate for article text. MOS:GENDERID says to use pronouns that fit someone's gender identity; it does not say that pronoun self-choice is unlimited. Our language has "he" for male identities, "she" for female ones, and "they" for non-binary ones. That is all-inclusive.
- Therefore, even if someone said that their preferred pronouns are only "fae/faer" or something else like that, those should not be used in an article. While "they" can be a preferred pronoun, it is also used to refer to people regardless of gender, and could be used in such situations.
Crossroads
-talk- 22:28, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- Why would obvious jokes affect the rules we have? We don't treat BLPs as unreliable for the information of their birthday just because
some of them have running jokes that involve lying about it. Why would we even be looking to make rules based on
hard cases? Your supposed "clearly sensible" solution doesn't even cover many of the jokes made by transphobes, who sometimes pretend for some rhetorical flourish or perceived gotcha! moment to use either he/him or she/her pronouns, whichever is the opposite of what they actually use. In summary, the cases you raise are already addressed by existing common sense protocols that we manage to successfully apply in all other (politically uncontroversial) scenarios, and the "solution" you propose would not address the cases you raise. —
Bilorv (
talk) 22:54, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- Of course for binary pronouns we disregard mockery when sources treat it as such - that is unchanged by what I said. However, "obvious jokes" is not a usable cutoff for neopronouns. For example, is 'call me tree' a joke or not? To
EEng, it was an "obvious joke", but someone hauled him to ANI for treating it as such. How can we tell that is or is not a joke when that person is just as evidently cisgender as the person who put "beep/bop/boop" and who was unserious? (The "tree" person later called himself a he.) And just what is the cutoff then? What "rules we have" permit use of "fae" as a pronoun? "English Wikipedia should only communicate in English words" shouldn't be a controversial position.
Crossroads
-talk- 23:13, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- I have no idea what you're talking about, why you're trying to revive a conflict from six months ago involving an editor unrelated to this conversation, or what relevance any of this has to Solomon. You're asking me how to tell if a person is making a joke? —
Bilorv (
talk) 01:13, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- I am speaking in a general sense, as the heading does. This isn't the article for Solomon, but an explanatory supplement essay, and therefore is more general. Crossroads -talk- 02:07, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- I have no idea what you're talking about, why you're trying to revive a conflict from six months ago involving an editor unrelated to this conversation, or what relevance any of this has to Solomon. You're asking me how to tell if a person is making a joke? —
Bilorv (
talk) 01:13, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- Of course for binary pronouns we disregard mockery when sources treat it as such - that is unchanged by what I said. However, "obvious jokes" is not a usable cutoff for neopronouns. For example, is 'call me tree' a joke or not? To
EEng, it was an "obvious joke", but someone hauled him to ANI for treating it as such. How can we tell that is or is not a joke when that person is just as evidently cisgender as the person who put "beep/bop/boop" and who was unserious? (The "tree" person later called himself a he.) And just what is the cutoff then? What "rules we have" permit use of "fae" as a pronoun? "English Wikipedia should only communicate in English words" shouldn't be a controversial position.
Crossroads
-talk- 23:13, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- Why would obvious jokes affect the rules we have? We don't treat BLPs as unreliable for the information of their birthday just because
some of them have running jokes that involve lying about it. Why would we even be looking to make rules based on
hard cases? Your supposed "clearly sensible" solution doesn't even cover many of the jokes made by transphobes, who sometimes pretend for some rhetorical flourish or perceived gotcha! moment to use either he/him or she/her pronouns, whichever is the opposite of what they actually use. In summary, the cases you raise are already addressed by existing common sense protocols that we manage to successfully apply in all other (politically uncontroversial) scenarios, and the "solution" you propose would not address the cases you raise. —
Bilorv (
talk) 22:54, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- WP doesn't use neo-pronouns. WP does use singular-they, which is a perfectly appropriate choice (and what the average newspaper now does) for any TG/NB subject who does not use standard-English pronouns. If a notable subject is known to use neo-pronouns, then our article would likely note this (and what they are), but not actually use this non-standard
idiolect in its own voice. This has been discussed repeatedly at
WT:MOS and subpages thereof, as well as at many article talk pages. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 01:59, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- @
SMcCandlish: can you point me to three discussions that obtained local consensus that neo-pronouns could not be used despite them being the subject's preferred choice, or one discussion that obtained consensus that we should never use neo-pronouns? There's a lot of assertions you've made but no evidence beyond "some MOS discussions somewhere". —
Bilorv (
talk) 11:18, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- I've taken a cursory glance at MOS:IDINFO and the essay WP:GENDERID. I don't see any explicit discussion of neopronouns there or elsewhere (with the proviso that I have not looked very hard), which is a little surprising to me. I actually can't seem to find any guidance on the use of neopronouns at all. It surely cannot be the case that this has never come up before, notwithstanding that neopronouns are pretty uncommon. As has been pointed out above, we do have the singular they (or avoiding pronouns) as options, if consensus cannot be reached. I would however like to see some more explicit guidance in the MOS re neopronouns, one way or the other; and I feel that SMcCandlish's opinion above – that we should mention the article subject uses neopronouns without using them in text, as they are not part of standard English grammar and we write in standard English (and we do not try to restructure the English language to right great wrongs), which gives us the option of using "they" as a singular pronoun (objected to only by pedants) – is likely to be as close to consensus as we get. Archon 2488 ( talk) 16:51, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- We have a search function for a reason :-) [1] — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:57, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
- @
SMcCandlish: can you point me to three discussions that obtained local consensus that neo-pronouns could not be used despite them being the subject's preferred choice, or one discussion that obtained consensus that we should never use neo-pronouns? There's a lot of assertions you've made but no evidence beyond "some MOS discussions somewhere". —
Bilorv (
talk) 11:18, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- To throw in my own tuppence, as someone who's been an openly queer person my whole adult life, with a heavily queer-leaning social circle and a decent amount of participation in mainstream and other queer culture, I am tangentially aware of what neopronouns are. Meaning, as a piece of fairly esoteric academic knowledge that I possess, I know they exist, and could name a handful of them. I cannot begin to imagine how abstruse they would seem to 99% of our readership – hell, even to 99% of our queer readership, because frankly I read more abstruse LGBT+ content than most, and neopronouns virtually never appear.
- There is obviously no central authority on what acceptable neopronouns are (yes this is also true for standard English pronouns, but neopronouns are so far from common use that we cannot even entertain the idea of there being a cultural consensus on what "standard" ones are), so it's perhaps not even a meaningful question to ask how many there are. Sort of like asking how many non-English words could hypothetically exist. In any case, I've never come across anyone in any context who actually used them. I do strongly suspect they're obscure and unknown to the overwhelming majority of queer people, who will just use standard English vocabulary and grammar to express themselves, rather than confusing linguistic innovations that put me in mind of Esperanto – well-intentioned but poorly executed proposals to solve problems that might better be solved in other ways, without a clear idea of what they're trying to accomplish or an unambiguous USP over alternatives. Fundamentally, they ignore that language is a collective phenomenon, and individual speakers of a language cannot simply create their own private grammar. They also kinda remind me of xkcd's take on the perennial problem of "look how many problems there are with the existing standards; why don't we just invent a new one?" Archon 2488 ( talk) 17:07, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- A point I'm surprised nobody has yet raised is that we, after much discussion, accommodate the preferences of those such as
bell hooks who prefer their names to be spelled in lowercase, often as a similar personal choice to neopronouns. —
Bilorv (
talk) 22:46, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- This is a minor personal eccentricity, which I'd argue is a significantly smaller departure from standard English grammar (it doesn't even affect the spoken language) than trying to add new subject pronouns to the language. Might as well introduce new demonstrative pronouns, verbal inflections, noun cases, or intermediate-definiteness articles, if that is what the subject of the article believes in. Point is, we don't typically defer to the personal eccentricities of the subject of an article in determining how it should be written. But regardless, "bell hooks" is typically spelled that way by
WP:RS, so we don't really need to have the discussion. I am not aware of RS that typically use neopronouns as a matter of house style.
Archon 2488 (
talk) 08:14, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- There's no departure whatsoever from standard English grammar, just the introduction of new words—it is the case that hooks' preference actually departs from standard grammar (e.g. in capitalisation of the first letter of a sentence), but not that neopronouns do (they are used in the exact same manner as other pronouns without changing word order or conjugations or so on). Is your position that we should use neopronouns for a person if and only if most reliable sources do? Or something different? —
Bilorv (
talk) 19:00, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- I am not trying to speak for anyone else, but my view is that we should report that a person prefers neopronouns, but not actually use them as pronouns in Wikivoice. We should use "they/them" unless the person has explicitly objected to they/them, and in that case we should write without pronouns (they said reluctantly). Newimpartial ( talk) 19:25, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- I don't think refusing to capitalize a proper noun is a departure from standard English grammar (hence why you can't tell the difference in the spoken language), but only from standard English orthographic conventions. Sort of like insisting your name has to be written in the Cyrillic alphabet; if she'd insisted on writing her name "Бел хукс" that would be eccentric, but not a difference that would be reflected in spoken language. English is English whether it's written in upper or lower case Latin letters or back to front Cyrillic letters. Nor is using a name from a different language a violation of English grammatical rules, because we can just treat it the same as any other loanword. It's telling that pronouns are very rarely ever loanwords; they're an integral part of how a language works, every language (AFAIK) has them together with well established and usually firm grammatical and social rules around their use, and they tend to be quite resistant to linguistic change. By way of comparison, some languages use gendered first- and second-person pronouns, and others like Finnish do not have gendered pronouns at all, so this entire discussion would be pretty much inconceivable to a Finn. I mean this as evidence of how deeply embedded a language's pronoun system is in its grammar; you can't simply chop and change and add random bits to it, for reasons of ideology or practicality or whatever – not because of any conspiracy to suppress innovation in pronouns, but because that's realistically not how linguistic evolution works. People have attempted to effect social change by changing language for centuries – and it rarely achieves the desired result. Mainly because tinkering with the technicalities of language does little to change the reality that language describes.
- You write
they are used in the exact same manner as other pronouns without changing word order or conjugations or so on
– I mean, this might be true when they are used, which is so vanishingly rarely that it is genuinely hard to infer in a verifiable way how people actually would use them in real life. And if people can just coin their own pronouns, why not coin other grammatical innovations too, like new verbal inflections for the new pronouns? What constrains this? If you have as many pronouns as people, is there actually a point in them? Is there any difference at that point between a "pronoun" and a "name"? Point is, language doesn't work like that. The only times I have ever come across neopronouns have been in the context of what are in effect aspirational statements to the effect that the author believes having a wider collection of (invariably third-person singular) pronouns would somehow enrich the English language. Sort of like how it might be nice if everyone learned Esperanto as an auxiliary language. Maybe, but living on planet Earth, Esperanto is a fringe interest that nobody without a personal link to the community of speakers or who is not a language nerd knows about. - In any case, that neopronouns "should" be used more is a defensible POV maybe, but I do not think it an appropriate POV to endorse in WP's voice. WP does not care about what "should" be the case but what is the case – and mainstream use of neopronouns decidedly is not. Indeed, per WP:FRINGE I am very wary of giving undue weight to such a marginal linguistic use, especially in a context where vanishingly few if any of our WP:RS do. So I guess this answers your question: we are so far away from it being the consensus of RS to use neopronouns that at present it is a purely hypothetical situation. If the wider cultural consensus does change and neopronouns are adopted into wider usage (i.e. are anything less than totally obscure in real life) then that would be a circumstance in which there might be something to discuss here. But I think it unlikely, to be quite honest. And before then, I do feel that any attempt to enforce wider neopronoun use on WP will be seen as POV-pushing, and any such proposal will likely be dead on arrival. Archon 2488 ( talk) 19:30, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- I agree with Archon here. Heck, some people even insist on spelling their names in weird ways or choosing pen/stage names just to be different like "Jaxon" instead of "Jackson" or "Aydyyn" rather than "Aiden". So, I think hooks' spelling is just more of a creative take on that idea, and less of the usual "departure from standard English grammar" you would normally see people do with names. Huggums537 ( talk) 06:26, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
- Some copy editors do in fact capitalize her name. The Chicago Manual of Style Online also states that some publications ignore the preference. Language Log also argues that it is not necessary to ignore the usual capitalization rules for such individuals. Crossroads -talk- 04:30, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
- There's no departure whatsoever from standard English grammar, just the introduction of new words—it is the case that hooks' preference actually departs from standard grammar (e.g. in capitalisation of the first letter of a sentence), but not that neopronouns do (they are used in the exact same manner as other pronouns without changing word order or conjugations or so on). Is your position that we should use neopronouns for a person if and only if most reliable sources do? Or something different? —
Bilorv (
talk) 19:00, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- This is a minor personal eccentricity, which I'd argue is a significantly smaller departure from standard English grammar (it doesn't even affect the spoken language) than trying to add new subject pronouns to the language. Might as well introduce new demonstrative pronouns, verbal inflections, noun cases, or intermediate-definiteness articles, if that is what the subject of the article believes in. Point is, we don't typically defer to the personal eccentricities of the subject of an article in determining how it should be written. But regardless, "bell hooks" is typically spelled that way by
WP:RS, so we don't really need to have the discussion. I am not aware of RS that typically use neopronouns as a matter of house style.
Archon 2488 (
talk) 08:14, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- I'm not a fan of blanket statements on the matter (it's a really sensitive topic). However, in my limited experience, there are very few people who use neo-pronouns who would find the use of they/them extremely objectionable. With arguments like a neopronoun might get confused for being the subject's surname (which would obviously be compounded if the neo-pronouns were treated like proper nouns), I am a lot more sympathetic to (for example, I thought this was a discussion about a specific user's pronouns until I read past the headline). If a subject has expressed preference against use of they/them, then the article should be re-written to avoid pronouns altogether until it can be shown that a majority of WP:RS use the neo-pronouns (which at that point, we are kind of obligated to follow as well) while writing about the person. – MJL ‐Talk‐ ☖ 19:45, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- Use they / them Somewhere in the article mention one time the person's preferred pronouns, then switch to they / them as the neutral choice which is supposed to apply to the many pieces that are not part of the majority binary. The point of Wikipedia is to communicate and be understood. English Wikipedia editors also have some duty to make information suitable for migration into Wikidata and translated into other languages. Consequently, we should minimize the use of neologisms which will be little understood here and less understood in other contexts. If someone wants to set pronouns for broad online recognition, the place for that is Wikidata, where there is unlimited opportunity to name pronouns and define them within the pronoun ontology.
- In the future I expect the solution will be to put "fae" pronouns in Wikidata, those will migrate to the English Wikipedia infobox through meta:Wikidata Bridge, but the prose in English Wikipedia should be they/them as the right balance between precision and understability.
- I support change of our Manual of Style to be more accommodating in the future, but for that to happen, someone needs to collect some examples and draft a proposal. It would not be productive to support a change in practice without published guidance.
Blue Rasberry
(talk) 14:03, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
- Many aspects of BLP require us to absolutely take the subject at face value. When a living person says they have bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, we report that as fact. When a living person says they had an African-American slave great-great grandmother, we report that as fact. When a person reports a new gender identity every week, we update the article and report that as fact.
- If a subject of a BLP is a joker or a liar or an otherwise unreliable narrator about their own life, we have little to no mechanisms to stop believing them and redact information they have professed in reliable secondary sources. (See Pictures for Sad Children etc.) It is well-known that some artists such as Robert Smith (musician) don't think much of the press covering them and therefore lie incessantly, nay compulsively, to interviewers and the press ends up with a quite patchwork of falsehoods about the given person.
- I don't know a good solution to unreliable narrators or people making jokes with biographical elements, but it's clear that we are often duty-bound on Wikipedia to treat them seriously, take them at face value, and stick to what the
WP:RS and even
WP:SPS say about them regardless of our own opinions.
Elizium23 (
talk) 22:59, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
- Unreliable narrators are pretty rarely a concern here. The only case I can think of that pertains to gendered-language questions was someone (a musician, as I recall) saying their preferred pronoun was tree, and we don't call them tree. I do remember someone asserting that if we didn't call them tree that we were doing a wrong, and than anyone who disagreed should be punished (basically), but it turns out that the subject's own press managers call that person he (not even they) and don't take tree seriously, nor do reliable independent sources, so WP shouldn't either. In short: follow the sources to determine if the "narrator" is reliable, and MOS:GENDERID is already following the sources stylistically in defaulting to they when there is doubt. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:01, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
So, on the page Neuro-sama I removed the gendered she/her pronouns and replaced them with it/its on the basis that Neuro-sama is an AI, and thus an inanimate object. User:Meteoric91 added the pronouns back because, quote, "Neuro-sama was specifically designed to have gender-identifying properties, as stated by the creator Vedal himself and evidenced by Neuro-sama's art style, voice, and live mannerisms." I wanted to bring this to this page so that we could perhaps come to a decision as a community how it should be handled, and also perhaps update the MoS page itself to reflect whatever we decide. While this discussion is primarily related to the page Neuro-sama, it would also effect other AIs with "gender-identifying properties" such as Tay (chatbot) and Zo (bot), and possibly more that I am unaware of. Di (they-them) ( talk) 03:56, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- We routinely use gendered pronouns for entirely fictional characters, in printed-text fiction, graphic/animated stories, etc. That these particular fictional characters are "animated" by AI does not seem to me to require changing that usage. –
.Raven
.talk 04:26, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- I understand where you're coming from, but I think there's a key difference. The article isn't about a fictional character, but rather the chatbot itself
Di (they-them) (
talk) 04:30, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- The "persona" of the chatbot is the "fictional character" I mean. Rather as the Muppets' Kermit and Miss Piggy are he and she respectively, or as Dustin Hoffman's male character's "Mrs. Doubfire" persona is a "she" — like drag queens' personas — while the opposite for Tilda Swinton's male roles. – .Raven .talk 04:37, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- I understand where you're coming from, but I think there's a key difference. The article isn't about a fictional character, but rather the chatbot itself
Di (they-them) (
talk) 04:30, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Interesting topic to discuss. Particularly when you also bring in the topic of vocaloids, which are very clearly meant to be gendered in various ways. And many of these chatbots are meant to be the same. I would probably fall on the line of using "it" if it is just a program with no meaningful signifiers to relate to be anthropomorphic. For those that are meant to be anthropomorphized as characters (even without a visual avatar), I would default to using third person pronouns such as "they". And then for purposefully gendered programs where the gender is explicitly stated by the creators or the general community involved, I'd support using those gendered pronouns preferably over anything else.
- Hopefully that sort of nuanced take makes sense.
Silver
seren
C 04:27, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- It's clearer and more specific than my own comment a minute earlier, which did not cover when "it" or "they" might be more appropriate than gendered pronouns. Thank you, and I cede my position in favor of yours. – .Raven .talk 04:32, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- This is also my take. Allow me to expand a little. ChatGPT, for example, by default, is not designed with any specific attributes that would lead a user to believe that their interactions with the AI are synonymous of those with a gendered individual. Popular virtual assistants, such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, though presented with a feminine voice by default, are not designed to portray a gendered character. In these cases, the concept of gender is not a core, identifying feature of the product.
- In contrast, Neuro-sama IS designed to embody a large set of gendered characteristics, evidenced by the feminine artistic illustration and aesthetics of the avatar, the feminine voice, and the feminine mannerisms. Thus, the manifestation of the AI system, in this case, is a female virtual character who engages with viewers in real time by responding to their messages or initiating a discussion on a particular topic (on top of singing and playing video games). In addition, the creator, the avatar's illustrator, the avatar's Live2D rigger, the community Neuro-sama is primarily associated with (i.e. the VTuber community), as well as Neuro-sama herself (self-identification) all utilize "she/her" pronouns when referencing said AI manifestation.
- I appreciate the mention of vocaloids, such as Hatsune Miku, that are likely to contain qualities reflective of gender ( Miku's Wikipedia page uses "she/her" pronouns). Even inanimate objects, such as ships, can be referenced with "she/her/hers" (predominantly) or "he/him/his" (minorly). In conclusion, while referring to such gender-portraying chatbots/AI as "it/its" or "they/their" would technically not be incorrect, the usage of such pronouns would diminish a key identifying feature that these chatbots/AI were explicitly designed to possess. Meteoric91 ( talk) 08:23, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- I like this answer. I am extremely wary of degendering projects intended to have gender, whatever form they take, and if the project uses gendered pronouns to describe their creation, I would support using those pronouns.
- As another argument: I would expect to see gendered pronouns used to describe an NPC in a video-game, which are also systems that respond to users. It does not seem to me that this should depend on the level of fictionality of the game, but rather the extent to which the entity is a character with gender. For example, the current revision of
Dragon Age: Origins uses "her" to refer to the Flemeth character that the in-game player character interacts with, as I would expect. The current revision of the
Duolingo article uses "himself" to refer to the owl, who is a fictional character that the real-world user of Duolingo interacts with. I don't see any good reason why either of those should be changed, and so this seems to extend neatly to chatbots like Tay.
Kalany (
talk) 02:38, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
- And of course "NPC" (non-player character) goes back to RPGs (role-playing games) like Dungeons & Dragons, in which the characters are quite routinely gendered — unless mechanisms or otherwise inherently non-gendered — and the gender of a player's character might differ from that of the player. – .Raven .talk 07:36, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
- So there are two sides to this. As discussed above, in the context of the AI as a fictional character, human pronouns are better. However, there is also the aspect of discussing the AI in the context of being an AI. The phrases "she is an
artificial neural network" or "he was used by 176,000 people in 2018" are very confusing. Then again, so would switching pronouns mid-article. Hm...
Snowmanonahoe (
talk ·
contribs ·
typos) 04:38, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- One would have to be clear when one was referring to the persona or the software — as when referring to a Muppet *character* vs. the physical puppet made of cloth, thread, stuffing, etc. – .Raven .talk 04:40, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- I would suggest that this edge case is best handled with using the name ("ChatBob is a neural network") or re-writing ("The search feature was used by 50 billion people in April"). Kalany ( talk) 02:22, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
gender-identifying properties
— Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender, not the gender that someone else (including creator, parent or obstetrician) assigns. Are we saying that Neuro-sama is sentient? Because that's the only reasonable way we say that Neuro-sama has a gender. Mitch Ames ( talk) 04:51, 12 June 2023 (UTC)- As discussed above, by that logic we would use object pronouns for fictional characters. Snowmanonahoe ( talk · contribs · typos) 04:55, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Then are Kermit, Miss Piggy, Mrs. Doubtfire, and (to pick just one) Tilda Swinton's 2018-Suspiria character Dr. Jozef Klemperer, all ungendered? Because people other than those characters assigned their genders. –
.Raven
.talk 04:56, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Is a chatbot a fictional character in a fictional universe?
- A fictional character is created by someone who assigned the gender, but we suspend disbelief and pretend that the character is a real self-aware person - not the construct of an author/writer - who can thus express an independent identity, within the constraints of the fictional universe.
- But I suggest that Neuro-sama is not a fictional character in a fictional universe. Neuro-sama is a real piece of software, running on a real computer, in the "real" (as distinct from fictional) world.
- One solution would be to separate the (real) software (
chatbot: "a software application that aims to mimic human conversation") from the (fictional) character: "Neuro-sama is the character portrayed by a chatbot ... She ...".
Mitch Ames (
talk) 05:31, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Yes, as suggested above at 04:40, 12 June 2023 (UTC). – .Raven .talk 07:30, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Has there been a large enough body of articles or discussions to warrant a site-wide guidance? Any prescription one way or the other at this point seems
WP:CREEP. Follow reliable sources and sort out any disagreement on article talk pages, as with pretty much anything else.
Nardog (
talk) 05:11, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks Nardog.
- This has to be the answer.
- "Has there been a large enough body of articles or discussions to warrant a site-wide guidance? Any prescription one way or the other at this point seems WP:CREEP. Follow reliable sources and sort out any disagreement on article talk pages, as with pretty much anything else. " Lukewarmbeer ( talk) 07:44, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- I do not feel that changing the gendered pronouns in this article was the right editorial decision. I grant that sex is a biological characteristic, and we're not talking about a biological entity, and therefore the character doesn't have a sex; but there's a lot more to it than this. Firstly, Neuro-sama is a fictional character and fictional characters use gender pronouns even though they don't have any physical existence, let alone a sex. Secondly, grammatical gender isn't psychosocial gender. English-speaking people with dysphoria often, and understandably, care a lot about the pronouns we use for them and we're always right to respect their choices -- but this character is not a person with dysphoria. She's a gendered construct. We should apply the rules of language, not the rules of biology, and linguistically she would take the feminine pronouns -- although I think you might need to speak another Indo-European language that isn't English to feel the force of this second argument properly? Anyway, I would suggest changing it back.— S Marshall T/ C 08:52, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- In Pride Month, when nonbinary people's pronouns are being debated and defaulted to gendered forms on a handful of talk pages, we're worrying about the gender identity of chatbots 🤯
- Given that we are, I agree with @ Silver seren, who has made a nuanced point pretty eloquently. — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 11:21, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- The language in the article should reflect the language used in the coverage of the topic. On Neuro-sama in particular, the vast majority (if not all) of her coverage uses gendered pronouns (e.g.
VTuber Neuro-sama terrifies viewers with her gruesome game concept,
"As her name implies, Neuro-sama is essentially a neural network with a VTuber-style face.",
"She acts like a regular streamer who plays games and interacts with the chat but she's AI.") I think deviating from the general consensus on the language used on the topic would violate
WP:OR, so at least in this case, Neuro-sama should use feminine pronouns. Other AIs should be taken on a case-by-case basis.
Qwaiiplayer (
talk) 12:27, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- This is what I was going to say as well. How we refer to any aspect of any topic is based on how it is referred to in reliable sources. Anything else brings us into OR territory. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 16:10, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- It suddenly occurred to me that there's old precedent for this situation: HAL 9000, in Clarke's and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey – the two astronauts "agree to disconnect HAL if he is proven wrong". – .Raven .talk 16:24, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Use it. Yes, even if that means cleaning up old material about HAL 9000. AI and robots do not have actual gender, whatever the intentions of their designers, and using she or he is romanticizing nonsense, and unencyclopedic, emotive writing. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 02:51, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- By that argument, why shouldn't we use "it" for all fictional characters? Silver seren C 03:12, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- > "
cleaning up old material about HAL 9000
" – We could change "he"→"it" in the 2001 and HAL 9000 articles, but since the novel and film (and many publications/websites) would continue to use "he", we'd be departing from the sources in order to impose our own opinion, something of a no-no here. – .Raven .talk 06:09, 14 June 2023 (UTC)- This is interesting because we're remarkably inconsistent about this in our articles about AIs -- whether real or fictional. In
Amazon Alexa,
Siri, and
Cortana (virtual assistant), which are articles about software, all the virtual assistants are "it". In
The Terminator, the Terminator is "it", but in
Terminator (character) the Terminator is "he".
C-3P0,
K-2S0 and
R2-D2 are all "he".
K9 (Doctor Who) is "he", but in
Dalek (Doctor Who episode) the Dalek (admittedly not strictly an AI in the fictional uinverse) is "it". I suspect that in the articles about fictional AIs, sympathetic/protagonist AIs tend to take gendered pronouns and antagonistic AIs take inanimate ones.I want to stress that an entity's grammatical gender doesn't need to reflect its reproductive plumbing or lack thereof. That's an uncontroversial thing to say in most Indo-European languages. I know it's surprising in English, and controversial and political in American. But deciding a creature's pronouns based on its plumbing is potentially oppressive.—
S Marshall
T/
C 10:04, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- Exactly this. Frankly, this kind of reductive hostility around gender is unhelpful, @
SMcCandlish.
OwenBlacker (he/him;
Talk) 10:15, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- In point of fact, I find S Marshall's argument fairly persuasive. I've said nothing hostile. The fact that you and a few others habitually dive immediately into a WP:BATTLEGROUND stance any time you run into something of a "doctrinal" difference in position is why this topic on WP is so awful and why people keep getting topic-banned from it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:03, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- Re Terminators: see also Terminator (character concept)) [consistently "it"] and T-X [played in the third film by Kristanna Loken; mostly "it", but one time "her"].Re Daleks: we know that the creatures inside the machines are alive (derived from human or humanoid cells), but don't know their genders nor even whether they have genders, as we also don't know how they reproduce. It may be asexually, like amoebae, by division, or by cloning. Their intense emphasis on genetic purity (Daleks kill other Daleks "for perceived genetic impurity") may not tolerate even the sort of genetic diversity that sexual reproduction involves, e.g. some having XX chromosomes and some XY. We aren't told such details, and can't speculate in articles.Re "in most Indo-European languages": you may be interested in Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender. – .Raven .talk 15:27, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
I know it's surprising in English, and controversial and political in American.
– Implying that transgender people aren't as oppressed outside of America and the Anglosphere comes off as, at best, insensitive. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 17:31, 15 June 2023 (UTC)- I said absolutely nothing to imply or suggest that in any way at all, and my remarks could only be understood that way if taken completely out of context.— S Marshall T/ C 14:44, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- Are we particularly inconsistent? We surely are to some extent, but I think it's obvious to call Siri and other voice assistants "it"; several of them started out with only one female voice, but now they offer a choice of female/male/androgynous voices. Don't know about the others, but for Siri, there's no "default" voice (it asks upon setup, and if the user doesn't choose, it picks randomly rather than always picking the female voice), so "it" is the natural pronoun. DFlhb ( talk) 11:48, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
- Exactly this. Frankly, this kind of reductive hostility around gender is unhelpful, @
SMcCandlish.
OwenBlacker (he/him;
Talk) 10:15, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- This is interesting because we're remarkably inconsistent about this in our articles about AIs -- whether real or fictional. In
Amazon Alexa,
Siri, and
Cortana (virtual assistant), which are articles about software, all the virtual assistants are "it". In
The Terminator, the Terminator is "it", but in
Terminator (character) the Terminator is "he".
C-3P0,
K-2S0 and
R2-D2 are all "he".
K9 (Doctor Who) is "he", but in
Dalek (Doctor Who episode) the Dalek (admittedly not strictly an AI in the fictional uinverse) is "it". I suspect that in the articles about fictional AIs, sympathetic/protagonist AIs tend to take gendered pronouns and antagonistic AIs take inanimate ones.I want to stress that an entity's grammatical gender doesn't need to reflect its reproductive plumbing or lack thereof. That's an uncontroversial thing to say in most Indo-European languages. I know it's surprising in English, and controversial and political in American. But deciding a creature's pronouns based on its plumbing is potentially oppressive.—
S Marshall
T/
C 10:04, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- I see no inconsistency. Terminators and other entirely-fictional AIs only exist in a fictional context, so a reader will understand that when we use human pronouns for them we are saying only that they are treated as people within that fictional context. Alexa, though, exists in the real world; to use human pronouns for it in the article voice is to imply that it genuinely, in some sense, qualifies as a person in the real world, ie. that usage would imply an WP:EXCEPTIONAL claim about the underlying technology, which requires high-quality secondary sourcing to support. I would suggest a guidance that AIs from works of fiction should use whatever pronouns are used for them in that fiction; but that real-world ones should default to "it" unless overwhelming high-quality WP:INDEPENDENT WP:SECONDARY coverage supports a more human pronoun; this, to me, reflects both our sourcing policy and our current practice. -- Aquillion ( talk) 07:06, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
- The simplest solution to me seems to be to use whatever pronouns the subject's developers use when referring to their creation. If the developers use she/her, use she/her. If it's he/him, then use he/him. If they/them, then use they/them. With some exceptions, chatbots and conversational AIs seem fit into a middle ground between pure software packages and fictional characters. Where the bot is gendered by its creator, it makes sense to refer to it by whatever gendered terms and pronouns are contextually appropriate.
Sideswipe9th (
talk) 17:47, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
- No primary/secondary source distinction here? –
.Raven
.talk 00:19, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- Good question. Were it not for the crossover between chatbots being pure software and fictional characters, I would say defer primarily to secondary sources. But because there often is a crossover, and particularly where the bot's creator is intention is for the bot to be semiotically
gender coded I think deferring to authorial intent is the better approach here.
Sideswipe9th (
talk) 00:36, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- No primary/secondary source distinction. Our articles have to mean what the reliable sources mean, but they don't have to use the words the reliable sources use. We have to write articles in
WP:OUROWNWORDS.—
S Marshall
T/
C 14:37, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- I would argue we should rely solely on secondary sources for this, and completely disregard primary or non- WP:INDEPENDENT ones. Primary sources (ie. companies rolling out chatbots) have extremely strong incentives to humanize them in the eyes of the public, since it makes them seem more impressive than they may actually be. This makes primary sources bad ones the question of whether we should use that framing in our own article voice, in the same way that we wouldn't use a primary source for any other wording that might imply that a piece of tech is extraordinary or groundbreaking. We could quote or attribute eg. Amazon's statements that "Alexa is basically human!" or whatever, but to use Amazon as a primary source to guide our article-voice treatment in that direction seems inappropriate. -- Aquillion ( talk) 06:57, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
- No primary/secondary source distinction. Our articles have to mean what the reliable sources mean, but they don't have to use the words the reliable sources use. We have to write articles in
WP:OUROWNWORDS.—
S Marshall
T/
C 14:37, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- Good question. Were it not for the crossover between chatbots being pure software and fictional characters, I would say defer primarily to secondary sources. But because there often is a crossover, and particularly where the bot's creator is intention is for the bot to be semiotically
gender coded I think deferring to authorial intent is the better approach here.
Sideswipe9th (
talk) 00:36, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- Agreed. DFlhb ( talk) 11:50, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
- No primary/secondary source distinction here? –
.Raven
.talk 00:19, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- I would use "human" pronouns for AIs only if the majority of high-quality secondary sources do. I wouldn't rely on primary or non- WP:INDEPENDENT sources for that - this isn't a gender issue, it's a "do we portray the AI as if it were a person?" issue. And primary sources are going to have a strong incentive to humanize their AIs, since that makes them seem more impressive; we shouldn't accept that framing unless secondary sources do. I also think that this is different from fictional characters in that, when we use human pronouns for a fictional character, we're clearly doing so in a "fictional context", which most readers will understand; whereas when we refer to an AI as "he" or "she", we're risking an implicit statement of "this AI is, in some sense, an actual person" and are encouraging the reader to think of them way. That's perhaps a complicated philosophical or social question, which is why we should leave it up to secondary sources; and I would argue that the implication of "this AI is, in fact, a person" is currently an WP:EXCEPTIONAL claim, hence we should require an actual majority among high-quality stories and not eg. a single "wow-isn't-this-cool" puff piece. Obviously if "strong" AI ever does become a thing, this would change completely, but that's not the case at the moment. -- Aquillion ( talk) 06:53, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
- I know I'm a week after much of this conversation but the tag is still there. I don't think there is a lot of risk to deferring to independent sources to override a default of "it". I agree that we should not rely on primary sources. I think the level of reliability of those sources is up for debate. Eg. if virtually all the UGC uses one pronoun, but the most reliable media has not picked it up, I think there's a "common parlance" argument to be made to allow use of either/both pronounces as is appropriate. More generally, I think we should also avoid guidelines to enforce consistency if what we consider reliable sources use differing/multiple pronouns, and allow editors to let the article settle on its own towards one or multiple, whatever appropriate. — siro χ o 20:59, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
- There seems to be a few different things being discussed above, ranging from chatbots whose developers are incentivized to try to humanize them with human pronouns all the way to fictional characters like C3PO or Bender from Futurama. In the case of fictional characters, at least, I would be against degendering the characters' pronouns. These characters are ultimately fictional persons - strong AI - even if not human per se; we should defer to how sources refer to them, which is usually as he or she. As for chatbots and such, I don't have an opinion on that right now. Crossroads -talk- 23:05, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
This style guide is mandating misgendering, and does no justice nor gives any respect to people who's pronouns happen to be neopronouns. If a person's pronouns are ze/zir, then zir Wikipedia article should continuously reflect that, and should not misgender them by using the singular they. 67.241.70.141 ( talk) 03:18, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
- What gender does ze/zir denote? What gender does the singular they denote? What is the difference?
Mitch Ames (
talk) 03:21, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
- It depends? I don't have sources; I doubt there... Are many. Forgive me for talking about what is 100% original research.
- My neopronouns (ve/ver/verself) sort of reflect the fact that my understanding of my gender is as a sort of floating signifier; I have a gender, absolutely, and it is not male nor female nor in between and it is signified only by itself, and I suppose by me. This is in contrast to they/them, which doesn't actually resonate as truly neutral to me; it feels like it doesn't reflect 'ambiguity', but rather a gender that is signified by a particular sort of ambiguity; and that gender feels as alien to me as maleness or femaleness.
- I've heard other trans people who dislike they/them, or prefer other pronouns over they/them say similar things, fwiw. 136.35.180.148 ( talk) 17:09, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
- Agreed, this is just blatant bigotry. Wikipedia is mandating that neopronoun users be misgendered, and this is just completely unacceptable for anyone who has morals. How is Wikipedia supposed to be a source of trusted information if users are required to misgender trans people? I exclusively use neopronouns. My pronouns are not they/them. Misgendering me and other trans people who use neopronouns is not "professional", it's just blatant bigotry, and is just going to make it harder for trans people to gain acceptance in our society if Wikipedia is going to forcibly hold people back from learning the most basic form of respect for us! Using our pronouns!
73.21.37.82 (
talk) 02:36, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thank you for saying this!!! I'm lucky in that I'm okay with they/them pronouns as well as my neopronouns, but that is not the case for everyone.
- For example: author Maia Kobabe, who exclusively uses e/em/eir pronouns.
- It's unacceptable that e is repeatedly misgendered on the wiki page for eir book, Gender Queer, despite that book literally being about eir gender journey. How is it professional to completely ignore the background of an autobiography?
- When was this arbitrary decision about what is and isn't proper even made? (SEE EDIT)
- It's not like we can't just put a footnote after the pronoun to clarify. It's used on pages for people who use they/them pronouns (e.g. Lil Uzi Vert) so I don't see why we couldn't do the same for neopronouns.
- EDIT: Alright, there was a discussion had about this some time ago, but the conclusion supposedly reached does not align with what I've seen neopronoun users say.
- If one were refer to someone who only uses she/her pronouns with they/them pronouns, that would still be misgendering. Same with someone who exclusively uses he/him pronouns. I don't see why neopronouns are an exception. Sure, it's not conventional, but being nonbinary isn't either. What's so hard to respect?
-
Rainbowlack (
talk) 11:41, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
- The whole point of they / them is that those words are not gendered - the words " avoid reference towards a particular sex or gender". You cannot misgender someone by using a term that has no gender. Referring to someone as " they" instead of he/she/e is no more misgendering than referring to them as a person instead of a male/female/..., or referring to someone as a "police officer" instead of a policeman or policewoman, or referring to me (a cisgender male) as "that Wikipedia editor" instead of "him". They/them might not be a person's preferred pronouns but those words are not misgendering anyone. Mitch Ames ( talk) 12:26, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
- This dispute hinges on the meaning of the word 'transphobic'. Is the idea that the use of the
singular they is "transphobic" a logical idea? Well, the singular they was invented so that subject's gender is not identified. So is it transphobic to not identify the subject's gender at all because they do not prefer he/him or she/her pronouns? That depends on the meaning of the word "transphobic". If it is transphobic, then a further question is: what is the weight of that transphobia? Does it outweigh the need for consistency and readability?
JM (
talk) 14:49, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
- The section is
This Style Guide is Transphobic
, but the OP's statement is thatThis style guide is mandating misgendering ... Wikipedia article ... should not misgender them by using the singular they
. "Transphobic" and "misgendering" are not the same thing. Mitch Ames ( talk) 00:43, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
- The section is
If a subject uses multiple pronouns with no defined preference, e.g. Emma Seligman using both she/her and they/them pronouns, should the article consistently use the same pronouns for the subject, and how to determine which to use? Bklibcat67 ( talk) 19:00, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
- There isn't a hard-and-fast rule, nor should there be, but in general we should use the one they most favor, or if there's no stated preference then the one they list first. In rare cases where there's no consistent order in which they list pronouns (which in fairness I did for a while, on purpose), then I would treat it like MOS:ENGVAR or MOS:ERA: just use whatever the first editor of the article uses. As to consistency, the only time I can think of where it would make sense to be inconsistent is if the subject requests it and gives some well-defined rule, e.g. "I take she/her pronouns, or they/them for times prior to my transition" or "I take he/him pronouns in my personal capacity, but she/her when pertaining to my drag career". We should not, say, be alternating between she and they in an article just because a subject takes she/they. -- Tamzin[ cetacean needed (they|xe|she) 19:07, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
- Failing to be consistent with the usage of a subject's pronouns in an article would make it extremely confusing as to whom any particular instance of a pronoun is referring. JM ( talk) 14:52, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
- The discussion at Talk:Celia Rose Gooding#RfC on pronouns attempted to address a preference for any pronoun over another pronoun, and resolved without a clear consensus, but it seems pretty clear that alternating between pronouns was not considered as a strong option. There was some support for the idea that pronoun order is relevant (the RFC closer suggested that there was dispute on this, but as far as I can tell, that was a mistake). — HTGS ( talk) 21:04, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
User:Mathglot and others,
The section concerning pre-coming-out photos states "The article about
The Wachowskis, for example, is better without any pre-coming-out photos since the way they looked is not well known as they shied away from public appearances.", but the article concerning them has pre-coming-out photos,
this, so I think it is a bad idea to have contradictory information.
So I think that either the example should be changed on this page, or the photo should be changed on that page.
I can do stuff! (
talk) 01:27, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
-
Icandostuff Thanks for finding that; I was unaware of it. You have a very good point, and I don't know which is right. At first glance, I think the photos at
The Wachowskis should be changed, but I'd like to hear what others have to say. It's contradictory now, but the sky won't fall if it's inconsistent for a little while; let's have a wider discussion about this, and see where it goes. What do you think should happen here? Thanks again,
Mathglot (
talk) 02:36, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
- Personally, I think that that part of the policy is well thought-out, so I think that the image should be removed from their article. Though, I think that a good example is needed there, so I don't really know.
- Personally, I think that that part of the policy is well thought-out, so I think that the image should be removed from their article. Though, I think that a good example is needed there, so I don't really know.
- Thank You User:Mathglot, I can do stuff! ( talk) 03:35, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
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Rivers Solomon. Is the use of these "fae" pronouns according to policy? Equinox ◑ 20:11, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- Since the article's subject also lists "they/their" as acceptable - which are actual English-language pronouns - I think it was a mistake to switch to neopronouns. Newimpartial ( talk) 20:15, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- As it will be a completely new construction to most readers, we at least need a note on its first usage, not just the prose of the first sentence in "Personal life". WP:ASTONISH might be the most relevant part of policy for choosing between "they/them" and "fae/faer", and it would lean us towards the former. I can guarantee some readers will be confused about whether "Fae" (used capitalised at the start of some sentences in the article) is Solomon's surname, or some sort of pen name. Remember that almost no readers read most articles top to bottom, or even scan the page from top to bottom. However, we don't sacrifice correctness or precision of language (e.g. "one die, two dice") even when it can cause reader confusion, and maybe Solomon has indicated that fae prefer "fae/faer". — Bilorv ( talk) 20:35, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- No it is not, and I have fixed it. To be frank, language exists to communicate; there must be some limits to the pronouns that we can expected to use for a person. For example, there was this incident where someone at one point said something about being called "tree". There was also another person who put "beep/bop/boop" in her Twitter profile at one time. Both of these people are equally evidently cisgender, but one was criticized for ridiculing transgender people, while the other had an army of Twitter fans earnestly policing others to use the neopronoun, and making edits and edit requests here. Go figure. Blaire White, a trans woman, has in her Twitter profile "Pronouns: that/bitch". Now, a reasonable person would understand that is not meant to be taken seriously - especially if you know White's viewpoints.
- Clearly, the line has to be drawn somewere. And the clearly sensible cutoff is that we only use pronouns that are recognized as such by English-language dictionaries. Anything else is WP:RGW language reform attempts that are not appropriate for article text. MOS:GENDERID says to use pronouns that fit someone's gender identity; it does not say that pronoun self-choice is unlimited. Our language has "he" for male identities, "she" for female ones, and "they" for non-binary ones. That is all-inclusive.
- Therefore, even if someone said that their preferred pronouns are only "fae/faer" or something else like that, those should not be used in an article. While "they" can be a preferred pronoun, it is also used to refer to people regardless of gender, and could be used in such situations.
Crossroads
-talk- 22:28, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- Why would obvious jokes affect the rules we have? We don't treat BLPs as unreliable for the information of their birthday just because
some of them have running jokes that involve lying about it. Why would we even be looking to make rules based on
hard cases? Your supposed "clearly sensible" solution doesn't even cover many of the jokes made by transphobes, who sometimes pretend for some rhetorical flourish or perceived gotcha! moment to use either he/him or she/her pronouns, whichever is the opposite of what they actually use. In summary, the cases you raise are already addressed by existing common sense protocols that we manage to successfully apply in all other (politically uncontroversial) scenarios, and the "solution" you propose would not address the cases you raise. —
Bilorv (
talk) 22:54, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- Of course for binary pronouns we disregard mockery when sources treat it as such - that is unchanged by what I said. However, "obvious jokes" is not a usable cutoff for neopronouns. For example, is 'call me tree' a joke or not? To
EEng, it was an "obvious joke", but someone hauled him to ANI for treating it as such. How can we tell that is or is not a joke when that person is just as evidently cisgender as the person who put "beep/bop/boop" and who was unserious? (The "tree" person later called himself a he.) And just what is the cutoff then? What "rules we have" permit use of "fae" as a pronoun? "English Wikipedia should only communicate in English words" shouldn't be a controversial position.
Crossroads
-talk- 23:13, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- I have no idea what you're talking about, why you're trying to revive a conflict from six months ago involving an editor unrelated to this conversation, or what relevance any of this has to Solomon. You're asking me how to tell if a person is making a joke? —
Bilorv (
talk) 01:13, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- I am speaking in a general sense, as the heading does. This isn't the article for Solomon, but an explanatory supplement essay, and therefore is more general. Crossroads -talk- 02:07, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- I have no idea what you're talking about, why you're trying to revive a conflict from six months ago involving an editor unrelated to this conversation, or what relevance any of this has to Solomon. You're asking me how to tell if a person is making a joke? —
Bilorv (
talk) 01:13, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- Of course for binary pronouns we disregard mockery when sources treat it as such - that is unchanged by what I said. However, "obvious jokes" is not a usable cutoff for neopronouns. For example, is 'call me tree' a joke or not? To
EEng, it was an "obvious joke", but someone hauled him to ANI for treating it as such. How can we tell that is or is not a joke when that person is just as evidently cisgender as the person who put "beep/bop/boop" and who was unserious? (The "tree" person later called himself a he.) And just what is the cutoff then? What "rules we have" permit use of "fae" as a pronoun? "English Wikipedia should only communicate in English words" shouldn't be a controversial position.
Crossroads
-talk- 23:13, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- Why would obvious jokes affect the rules we have? We don't treat BLPs as unreliable for the information of their birthday just because
some of them have running jokes that involve lying about it. Why would we even be looking to make rules based on
hard cases? Your supposed "clearly sensible" solution doesn't even cover many of the jokes made by transphobes, who sometimes pretend for some rhetorical flourish or perceived gotcha! moment to use either he/him or she/her pronouns, whichever is the opposite of what they actually use. In summary, the cases you raise are already addressed by existing common sense protocols that we manage to successfully apply in all other (politically uncontroversial) scenarios, and the "solution" you propose would not address the cases you raise. —
Bilorv (
talk) 22:54, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- WP doesn't use neo-pronouns. WP does use singular-they, which is a perfectly appropriate choice (and what the average newspaper now does) for any TG/NB subject who does not use standard-English pronouns. If a notable subject is known to use neo-pronouns, then our article would likely note this (and what they are), but not actually use this non-standard
idiolect in its own voice. This has been discussed repeatedly at
WT:MOS and subpages thereof, as well as at many article talk pages. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 01:59, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- @
SMcCandlish: can you point me to three discussions that obtained local consensus that neo-pronouns could not be used despite them being the subject's preferred choice, or one discussion that obtained consensus that we should never use neo-pronouns? There's a lot of assertions you've made but no evidence beyond "some MOS discussions somewhere". —
Bilorv (
talk) 11:18, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- I've taken a cursory glance at MOS:IDINFO and the essay WP:GENDERID. I don't see any explicit discussion of neopronouns there or elsewhere (with the proviso that I have not looked very hard), which is a little surprising to me. I actually can't seem to find any guidance on the use of neopronouns at all. It surely cannot be the case that this has never come up before, notwithstanding that neopronouns are pretty uncommon. As has been pointed out above, we do have the singular they (or avoiding pronouns) as options, if consensus cannot be reached. I would however like to see some more explicit guidance in the MOS re neopronouns, one way or the other; and I feel that SMcCandlish's opinion above – that we should mention the article subject uses neopronouns without using them in text, as they are not part of standard English grammar and we write in standard English (and we do not try to restructure the English language to right great wrongs), which gives us the option of using "they" as a singular pronoun (objected to only by pedants) – is likely to be as close to consensus as we get. Archon 2488 ( talk) 16:51, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- We have a search function for a reason :-) [1] — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:57, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
- @
SMcCandlish: can you point me to three discussions that obtained local consensus that neo-pronouns could not be used despite them being the subject's preferred choice, or one discussion that obtained consensus that we should never use neo-pronouns? There's a lot of assertions you've made but no evidence beyond "some MOS discussions somewhere". —
Bilorv (
talk) 11:18, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- To throw in my own tuppence, as someone who's been an openly queer person my whole adult life, with a heavily queer-leaning social circle and a decent amount of participation in mainstream and other queer culture, I am tangentially aware of what neopronouns are. Meaning, as a piece of fairly esoteric academic knowledge that I possess, I know they exist, and could name a handful of them. I cannot begin to imagine how abstruse they would seem to 99% of our readership – hell, even to 99% of our queer readership, because frankly I read more abstruse LGBT+ content than most, and neopronouns virtually never appear.
- There is obviously no central authority on what acceptable neopronouns are (yes this is also true for standard English pronouns, but neopronouns are so far from common use that we cannot even entertain the idea of there being a cultural consensus on what "standard" ones are), so it's perhaps not even a meaningful question to ask how many there are. Sort of like asking how many non-English words could hypothetically exist. In any case, I've never come across anyone in any context who actually used them. I do strongly suspect they're obscure and unknown to the overwhelming majority of queer people, who will just use standard English vocabulary and grammar to express themselves, rather than confusing linguistic innovations that put me in mind of Esperanto – well-intentioned but poorly executed proposals to solve problems that might better be solved in other ways, without a clear idea of what they're trying to accomplish or an unambiguous USP over alternatives. Fundamentally, they ignore that language is a collective phenomenon, and individual speakers of a language cannot simply create their own private grammar. They also kinda remind me of xkcd's take on the perennial problem of "look how many problems there are with the existing standards; why don't we just invent a new one?" Archon 2488 ( talk) 17:07, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- A point I'm surprised nobody has yet raised is that we, after much discussion, accommodate the preferences of those such as
bell hooks who prefer their names to be spelled in lowercase, often as a similar personal choice to neopronouns. —
Bilorv (
talk) 22:46, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- This is a minor personal eccentricity, which I'd argue is a significantly smaller departure from standard English grammar (it doesn't even affect the spoken language) than trying to add new subject pronouns to the language. Might as well introduce new demonstrative pronouns, verbal inflections, noun cases, or intermediate-definiteness articles, if that is what the subject of the article believes in. Point is, we don't typically defer to the personal eccentricities of the subject of an article in determining how it should be written. But regardless, "bell hooks" is typically spelled that way by
WP:RS, so we don't really need to have the discussion. I am not aware of RS that typically use neopronouns as a matter of house style.
Archon 2488 (
talk) 08:14, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- There's no departure whatsoever from standard English grammar, just the introduction of new words—it is the case that hooks' preference actually departs from standard grammar (e.g. in capitalisation of the first letter of a sentence), but not that neopronouns do (they are used in the exact same manner as other pronouns without changing word order or conjugations or so on). Is your position that we should use neopronouns for a person if and only if most reliable sources do? Or something different? —
Bilorv (
talk) 19:00, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- I am not trying to speak for anyone else, but my view is that we should report that a person prefers neopronouns, but not actually use them as pronouns in Wikivoice. We should use "they/them" unless the person has explicitly objected to they/them, and in that case we should write without pronouns (they said reluctantly). Newimpartial ( talk) 19:25, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- I don't think refusing to capitalize a proper noun is a departure from standard English grammar (hence why you can't tell the difference in the spoken language), but only from standard English orthographic conventions. Sort of like insisting your name has to be written in the Cyrillic alphabet; if she'd insisted on writing her name "Бел хукс" that would be eccentric, but not a difference that would be reflected in spoken language. English is English whether it's written in upper or lower case Latin letters or back to front Cyrillic letters. Nor is using a name from a different language a violation of English grammatical rules, because we can just treat it the same as any other loanword. It's telling that pronouns are very rarely ever loanwords; they're an integral part of how a language works, every language (AFAIK) has them together with well established and usually firm grammatical and social rules around their use, and they tend to be quite resistant to linguistic change. By way of comparison, some languages use gendered first- and second-person pronouns, and others like Finnish do not have gendered pronouns at all, so this entire discussion would be pretty much inconceivable to a Finn. I mean this as evidence of how deeply embedded a language's pronoun system is in its grammar; you can't simply chop and change and add random bits to it, for reasons of ideology or practicality or whatever – not because of any conspiracy to suppress innovation in pronouns, but because that's realistically not how linguistic evolution works. People have attempted to effect social change by changing language for centuries – and it rarely achieves the desired result. Mainly because tinkering with the technicalities of language does little to change the reality that language describes.
- You write
they are used in the exact same manner as other pronouns without changing word order or conjugations or so on
– I mean, this might be true when they are used, which is so vanishingly rarely that it is genuinely hard to infer in a verifiable way how people actually would use them in real life. And if people can just coin their own pronouns, why not coin other grammatical innovations too, like new verbal inflections for the new pronouns? What constrains this? If you have as many pronouns as people, is there actually a point in them? Is there any difference at that point between a "pronoun" and a "name"? Point is, language doesn't work like that. The only times I have ever come across neopronouns have been in the context of what are in effect aspirational statements to the effect that the author believes having a wider collection of (invariably third-person singular) pronouns would somehow enrich the English language. Sort of like how it might be nice if everyone learned Esperanto as an auxiliary language. Maybe, but living on planet Earth, Esperanto is a fringe interest that nobody without a personal link to the community of speakers or who is not a language nerd knows about. - In any case, that neopronouns "should" be used more is a defensible POV maybe, but I do not think it an appropriate POV to endorse in WP's voice. WP does not care about what "should" be the case but what is the case – and mainstream use of neopronouns decidedly is not. Indeed, per WP:FRINGE I am very wary of giving undue weight to such a marginal linguistic use, especially in a context where vanishingly few if any of our WP:RS do. So I guess this answers your question: we are so far away from it being the consensus of RS to use neopronouns that at present it is a purely hypothetical situation. If the wider cultural consensus does change and neopronouns are adopted into wider usage (i.e. are anything less than totally obscure in real life) then that would be a circumstance in which there might be something to discuss here. But I think it unlikely, to be quite honest. And before then, I do feel that any attempt to enforce wider neopronoun use on WP will be seen as POV-pushing, and any such proposal will likely be dead on arrival. Archon 2488 ( talk) 19:30, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- I agree with Archon here. Heck, some people even insist on spelling their names in weird ways or choosing pen/stage names just to be different like "Jaxon" instead of "Jackson" or "Aydyyn" rather than "Aiden". So, I think hooks' spelling is just more of a creative take on that idea, and less of the usual "departure from standard English grammar" you would normally see people do with names. Huggums537 ( talk) 06:26, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
- Some copy editors do in fact capitalize her name. The Chicago Manual of Style Online also states that some publications ignore the preference. Language Log also argues that it is not necessary to ignore the usual capitalization rules for such individuals. Crossroads -talk- 04:30, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
- There's no departure whatsoever from standard English grammar, just the introduction of new words—it is the case that hooks' preference actually departs from standard grammar (e.g. in capitalisation of the first letter of a sentence), but not that neopronouns do (they are used in the exact same manner as other pronouns without changing word order or conjugations or so on). Is your position that we should use neopronouns for a person if and only if most reliable sources do? Or something different? —
Bilorv (
talk) 19:00, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- This is a minor personal eccentricity, which I'd argue is a significantly smaller departure from standard English grammar (it doesn't even affect the spoken language) than trying to add new subject pronouns to the language. Might as well introduce new demonstrative pronouns, verbal inflections, noun cases, or intermediate-definiteness articles, if that is what the subject of the article believes in. Point is, we don't typically defer to the personal eccentricities of the subject of an article in determining how it should be written. But regardless, "bell hooks" is typically spelled that way by
WP:RS, so we don't really need to have the discussion. I am not aware of RS that typically use neopronouns as a matter of house style.
Archon 2488 (
talk) 08:14, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- I'm not a fan of blanket statements on the matter (it's a really sensitive topic). However, in my limited experience, there are very few people who use neo-pronouns who would find the use of they/them extremely objectionable. With arguments like a neopronoun might get confused for being the subject's surname (which would obviously be compounded if the neo-pronouns were treated like proper nouns), I am a lot more sympathetic to (for example, I thought this was a discussion about a specific user's pronouns until I read past the headline). If a subject has expressed preference against use of they/them, then the article should be re-written to avoid pronouns altogether until it can be shown that a majority of WP:RS use the neo-pronouns (which at that point, we are kind of obligated to follow as well) while writing about the person. – MJL ‐Talk‐ ☖ 19:45, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- Use they / them Somewhere in the article mention one time the person's preferred pronouns, then switch to they / them as the neutral choice which is supposed to apply to the many pieces that are not part of the majority binary. The point of Wikipedia is to communicate and be understood. English Wikipedia editors also have some duty to make information suitable for migration into Wikidata and translated into other languages. Consequently, we should minimize the use of neologisms which will be little understood here and less understood in other contexts. If someone wants to set pronouns for broad online recognition, the place for that is Wikidata, where there is unlimited opportunity to name pronouns and define them within the pronoun ontology.
- In the future I expect the solution will be to put "fae" pronouns in Wikidata, those will migrate to the English Wikipedia infobox through meta:Wikidata Bridge, but the prose in English Wikipedia should be they/them as the right balance between precision and understability.
- I support change of our Manual of Style to be more accommodating in the future, but for that to happen, someone needs to collect some examples and draft a proposal. It would not be productive to support a change in practice without published guidance.
Blue Rasberry
(talk) 14:03, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
- Many aspects of BLP require us to absolutely take the subject at face value. When a living person says they have bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, we report that as fact. When a living person says they had an African-American slave great-great grandmother, we report that as fact. When a person reports a new gender identity every week, we update the article and report that as fact.
- If a subject of a BLP is a joker or a liar or an otherwise unreliable narrator about their own life, we have little to no mechanisms to stop believing them and redact information they have professed in reliable secondary sources. (See Pictures for Sad Children etc.) It is well-known that some artists such as Robert Smith (musician) don't think much of the press covering them and therefore lie incessantly, nay compulsively, to interviewers and the press ends up with a quite patchwork of falsehoods about the given person.
- I don't know a good solution to unreliable narrators or people making jokes with biographical elements, but it's clear that we are often duty-bound on Wikipedia to treat them seriously, take them at face value, and stick to what the
WP:RS and even
WP:SPS say about them regardless of our own opinions.
Elizium23 (
talk) 22:59, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
- Unreliable narrators are pretty rarely a concern here. The only case I can think of that pertains to gendered-language questions was someone (a musician, as I recall) saying their preferred pronoun was tree, and we don't call them tree. I do remember someone asserting that if we didn't call them tree that we were doing a wrong, and than anyone who disagreed should be punished (basically), but it turns out that the subject's own press managers call that person he (not even they) and don't take tree seriously, nor do reliable independent sources, so WP shouldn't either. In short: follow the sources to determine if the "narrator" is reliable, and MOS:GENDERID is already following the sources stylistically in defaulting to they when there is doubt. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:01, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
So, on the page Neuro-sama I removed the gendered she/her pronouns and replaced them with it/its on the basis that Neuro-sama is an AI, and thus an inanimate object. User:Meteoric91 added the pronouns back because, quote, "Neuro-sama was specifically designed to have gender-identifying properties, as stated by the creator Vedal himself and evidenced by Neuro-sama's art style, voice, and live mannerisms." I wanted to bring this to this page so that we could perhaps come to a decision as a community how it should be handled, and also perhaps update the MoS page itself to reflect whatever we decide. While this discussion is primarily related to the page Neuro-sama, it would also effect other AIs with "gender-identifying properties" such as Tay (chatbot) and Zo (bot), and possibly more that I am unaware of. Di (they-them) ( talk) 03:56, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- We routinely use gendered pronouns for entirely fictional characters, in printed-text fiction, graphic/animated stories, etc. That these particular fictional characters are "animated" by AI does not seem to me to require changing that usage. –
.Raven
.talk 04:26, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- I understand where you're coming from, but I think there's a key difference. The article isn't about a fictional character, but rather the chatbot itself
Di (they-them) (
talk) 04:30, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- The "persona" of the chatbot is the "fictional character" I mean. Rather as the Muppets' Kermit and Miss Piggy are he and she respectively, or as Dustin Hoffman's male character's "Mrs. Doubfire" persona is a "she" — like drag queens' personas — while the opposite for Tilda Swinton's male roles. – .Raven .talk 04:37, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- I understand where you're coming from, but I think there's a key difference. The article isn't about a fictional character, but rather the chatbot itself
Di (they-them) (
talk) 04:30, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Interesting topic to discuss. Particularly when you also bring in the topic of vocaloids, which are very clearly meant to be gendered in various ways. And many of these chatbots are meant to be the same. I would probably fall on the line of using "it" if it is just a program with no meaningful signifiers to relate to be anthropomorphic. For those that are meant to be anthropomorphized as characters (even without a visual avatar), I would default to using third person pronouns such as "they". And then for purposefully gendered programs where the gender is explicitly stated by the creators or the general community involved, I'd support using those gendered pronouns preferably over anything else.
- Hopefully that sort of nuanced take makes sense.
Silver
seren
C 04:27, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- It's clearer and more specific than my own comment a minute earlier, which did not cover when "it" or "they" might be more appropriate than gendered pronouns. Thank you, and I cede my position in favor of yours. – .Raven .talk 04:32, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- This is also my take. Allow me to expand a little. ChatGPT, for example, by default, is not designed with any specific attributes that would lead a user to believe that their interactions with the AI are synonymous of those with a gendered individual. Popular virtual assistants, such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, though presented with a feminine voice by default, are not designed to portray a gendered character. In these cases, the concept of gender is not a core, identifying feature of the product.
- In contrast, Neuro-sama IS designed to embody a large set of gendered characteristics, evidenced by the feminine artistic illustration and aesthetics of the avatar, the feminine voice, and the feminine mannerisms. Thus, the manifestation of the AI system, in this case, is a female virtual character who engages with viewers in real time by responding to their messages or initiating a discussion on a particular topic (on top of singing and playing video games). In addition, the creator, the avatar's illustrator, the avatar's Live2D rigger, the community Neuro-sama is primarily associated with (i.e. the VTuber community), as well as Neuro-sama herself (self-identification) all utilize "she/her" pronouns when referencing said AI manifestation.
- I appreciate the mention of vocaloids, such as Hatsune Miku, that are likely to contain qualities reflective of gender ( Miku's Wikipedia page uses "she/her" pronouns). Even inanimate objects, such as ships, can be referenced with "she/her/hers" (predominantly) or "he/him/his" (minorly). In conclusion, while referring to such gender-portraying chatbots/AI as "it/its" or "they/their" would technically not be incorrect, the usage of such pronouns would diminish a key identifying feature that these chatbots/AI were explicitly designed to possess. Meteoric91 ( talk) 08:23, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- I like this answer. I am extremely wary of degendering projects intended to have gender, whatever form they take, and if the project uses gendered pronouns to describe their creation, I would support using those pronouns.
- As another argument: I would expect to see gendered pronouns used to describe an NPC in a video-game, which are also systems that respond to users. It does not seem to me that this should depend on the level of fictionality of the game, but rather the extent to which the entity is a character with gender. For example, the current revision of
Dragon Age: Origins uses "her" to refer to the Flemeth character that the in-game player character interacts with, as I would expect. The current revision of the
Duolingo article uses "himself" to refer to the owl, who is a fictional character that the real-world user of Duolingo interacts with. I don't see any good reason why either of those should be changed, and so this seems to extend neatly to chatbots like Tay.
Kalany (
talk) 02:38, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
- And of course "NPC" (non-player character) goes back to RPGs (role-playing games) like Dungeons & Dragons, in which the characters are quite routinely gendered — unless mechanisms or otherwise inherently non-gendered — and the gender of a player's character might differ from that of the player. – .Raven .talk 07:36, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
- So there are two sides to this. As discussed above, in the context of the AI as a fictional character, human pronouns are better. However, there is also the aspect of discussing the AI in the context of being an AI. The phrases "she is an
artificial neural network" or "he was used by 176,000 people in 2018" are very confusing. Then again, so would switching pronouns mid-article. Hm...
Snowmanonahoe (
talk ·
contribs ·
typos) 04:38, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- One would have to be clear when one was referring to the persona or the software — as when referring to a Muppet *character* vs. the physical puppet made of cloth, thread, stuffing, etc. – .Raven .talk 04:40, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- I would suggest that this edge case is best handled with using the name ("ChatBob is a neural network") or re-writing ("The search feature was used by 50 billion people in April"). Kalany ( talk) 02:22, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
gender-identifying properties
— Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender, not the gender that someone else (including creator, parent or obstetrician) assigns. Are we saying that Neuro-sama is sentient? Because that's the only reasonable way we say that Neuro-sama has a gender. Mitch Ames ( talk) 04:51, 12 June 2023 (UTC)- As discussed above, by that logic we would use object pronouns for fictional characters. Snowmanonahoe ( talk · contribs · typos) 04:55, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Then are Kermit, Miss Piggy, Mrs. Doubtfire, and (to pick just one) Tilda Swinton's 2018-Suspiria character Dr. Jozef Klemperer, all ungendered? Because people other than those characters assigned their genders. –
.Raven
.talk 04:56, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Is a chatbot a fictional character in a fictional universe?
- A fictional character is created by someone who assigned the gender, but we suspend disbelief and pretend that the character is a real self-aware person - not the construct of an author/writer - who can thus express an independent identity, within the constraints of the fictional universe.
- But I suggest that Neuro-sama is not a fictional character in a fictional universe. Neuro-sama is a real piece of software, running on a real computer, in the "real" (as distinct from fictional) world.
- One solution would be to separate the (real) software (
chatbot: "a software application that aims to mimic human conversation") from the (fictional) character: "Neuro-sama is the character portrayed by a chatbot ... She ...".
Mitch Ames (
talk) 05:31, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Yes, as suggested above at 04:40, 12 June 2023 (UTC). – .Raven .talk 07:30, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Has there been a large enough body of articles or discussions to warrant a site-wide guidance? Any prescription one way or the other at this point seems
WP:CREEP. Follow reliable sources and sort out any disagreement on article talk pages, as with pretty much anything else.
Nardog (
talk) 05:11, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks Nardog.
- This has to be the answer.
- "Has there been a large enough body of articles or discussions to warrant a site-wide guidance? Any prescription one way or the other at this point seems WP:CREEP. Follow reliable sources and sort out any disagreement on article talk pages, as with pretty much anything else. " Lukewarmbeer ( talk) 07:44, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- I do not feel that changing the gendered pronouns in this article was the right editorial decision. I grant that sex is a biological characteristic, and we're not talking about a biological entity, and therefore the character doesn't have a sex; but there's a lot more to it than this. Firstly, Neuro-sama is a fictional character and fictional characters use gender pronouns even though they don't have any physical existence, let alone a sex. Secondly, grammatical gender isn't psychosocial gender. English-speaking people with dysphoria often, and understandably, care a lot about the pronouns we use for them and we're always right to respect their choices -- but this character is not a person with dysphoria. She's a gendered construct. We should apply the rules of language, not the rules of biology, and linguistically she would take the feminine pronouns -- although I think you might need to speak another Indo-European language that isn't English to feel the force of this second argument properly? Anyway, I would suggest changing it back.— S Marshall T/ C 08:52, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- In Pride Month, when nonbinary people's pronouns are being debated and defaulted to gendered forms on a handful of talk pages, we're worrying about the gender identity of chatbots 🤯
- Given that we are, I agree with @ Silver seren, who has made a nuanced point pretty eloquently. — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 11:21, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- The language in the article should reflect the language used in the coverage of the topic. On Neuro-sama in particular, the vast majority (if not all) of her coverage uses gendered pronouns (e.g.
VTuber Neuro-sama terrifies viewers with her gruesome game concept,
"As her name implies, Neuro-sama is essentially a neural network with a VTuber-style face.",
"She acts like a regular streamer who plays games and interacts with the chat but she's AI.") I think deviating from the general consensus on the language used on the topic would violate
WP:OR, so at least in this case, Neuro-sama should use feminine pronouns. Other AIs should be taken on a case-by-case basis.
Qwaiiplayer (
talk) 12:27, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- This is what I was going to say as well. How we refer to any aspect of any topic is based on how it is referred to in reliable sources. Anything else brings us into OR territory. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 16:10, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- It suddenly occurred to me that there's old precedent for this situation: HAL 9000, in Clarke's and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey – the two astronauts "agree to disconnect HAL if he is proven wrong". – .Raven .talk 16:24, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
- Use it. Yes, even if that means cleaning up old material about HAL 9000. AI and robots do not have actual gender, whatever the intentions of their designers, and using she or he is romanticizing nonsense, and unencyclopedic, emotive writing. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 02:51, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- By that argument, why shouldn't we use "it" for all fictional characters? Silver seren C 03:12, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- > "
cleaning up old material about HAL 9000
" – We could change "he"→"it" in the 2001 and HAL 9000 articles, but since the novel and film (and many publications/websites) would continue to use "he", we'd be departing from the sources in order to impose our own opinion, something of a no-no here. – .Raven .talk 06:09, 14 June 2023 (UTC)- This is interesting because we're remarkably inconsistent about this in our articles about AIs -- whether real or fictional. In
Amazon Alexa,
Siri, and
Cortana (virtual assistant), which are articles about software, all the virtual assistants are "it". In
The Terminator, the Terminator is "it", but in
Terminator (character) the Terminator is "he".
C-3P0,
K-2S0 and
R2-D2 are all "he".
K9 (Doctor Who) is "he", but in
Dalek (Doctor Who episode) the Dalek (admittedly not strictly an AI in the fictional uinverse) is "it". I suspect that in the articles about fictional AIs, sympathetic/protagonist AIs tend to take gendered pronouns and antagonistic AIs take inanimate ones.I want to stress that an entity's grammatical gender doesn't need to reflect its reproductive plumbing or lack thereof. That's an uncontroversial thing to say in most Indo-European languages. I know it's surprising in English, and controversial and political in American. But deciding a creature's pronouns based on its plumbing is potentially oppressive.—
S Marshall
T/
C 10:04, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- Exactly this. Frankly, this kind of reductive hostility around gender is unhelpful, @
SMcCandlish.
OwenBlacker (he/him;
Talk) 10:15, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- In point of fact, I find S Marshall's argument fairly persuasive. I've said nothing hostile. The fact that you and a few others habitually dive immediately into a WP:BATTLEGROUND stance any time you run into something of a "doctrinal" difference in position is why this topic on WP is so awful and why people keep getting topic-banned from it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:03, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- Re Terminators: see also Terminator (character concept)) [consistently "it"] and T-X [played in the third film by Kristanna Loken; mostly "it", but one time "her"].Re Daleks: we know that the creatures inside the machines are alive (derived from human or humanoid cells), but don't know their genders nor even whether they have genders, as we also don't know how they reproduce. It may be asexually, like amoebae, by division, or by cloning. Their intense emphasis on genetic purity (Daleks kill other Daleks "for perceived genetic impurity") may not tolerate even the sort of genetic diversity that sexual reproduction involves, e.g. some having XX chromosomes and some XY. We aren't told such details, and can't speculate in articles.Re "in most Indo-European languages": you may be interested in Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender. – .Raven .talk 15:27, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
I know it's surprising in English, and controversial and political in American.
– Implying that transgender people aren't as oppressed outside of America and the Anglosphere comes off as, at best, insensitive. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 17:31, 15 June 2023 (UTC)- I said absolutely nothing to imply or suggest that in any way at all, and my remarks could only be understood that way if taken completely out of context.— S Marshall T/ C 14:44, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- Are we particularly inconsistent? We surely are to some extent, but I think it's obvious to call Siri and other voice assistants "it"; several of them started out with only one female voice, but now they offer a choice of female/male/androgynous voices. Don't know about the others, but for Siri, there's no "default" voice (it asks upon setup, and if the user doesn't choose, it picks randomly rather than always picking the female voice), so "it" is the natural pronoun. DFlhb ( talk) 11:48, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
- Exactly this. Frankly, this kind of reductive hostility around gender is unhelpful, @
SMcCandlish.
OwenBlacker (he/him;
Talk) 10:15, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- This is interesting because we're remarkably inconsistent about this in our articles about AIs -- whether real or fictional. In
Amazon Alexa,
Siri, and
Cortana (virtual assistant), which are articles about software, all the virtual assistants are "it". In
The Terminator, the Terminator is "it", but in
Terminator (character) the Terminator is "he".
C-3P0,
K-2S0 and
R2-D2 are all "he".
K9 (Doctor Who) is "he", but in
Dalek (Doctor Who episode) the Dalek (admittedly not strictly an AI in the fictional uinverse) is "it". I suspect that in the articles about fictional AIs, sympathetic/protagonist AIs tend to take gendered pronouns and antagonistic AIs take inanimate ones.I want to stress that an entity's grammatical gender doesn't need to reflect its reproductive plumbing or lack thereof. That's an uncontroversial thing to say in most Indo-European languages. I know it's surprising in English, and controversial and political in American. But deciding a creature's pronouns based on its plumbing is potentially oppressive.—
S Marshall
T/
C 10:04, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
- I see no inconsistency. Terminators and other entirely-fictional AIs only exist in a fictional context, so a reader will understand that when we use human pronouns for them we are saying only that they are treated as people within that fictional context. Alexa, though, exists in the real world; to use human pronouns for it in the article voice is to imply that it genuinely, in some sense, qualifies as a person in the real world, ie. that usage would imply an WP:EXCEPTIONAL claim about the underlying technology, which requires high-quality secondary sourcing to support. I would suggest a guidance that AIs from works of fiction should use whatever pronouns are used for them in that fiction; but that real-world ones should default to "it" unless overwhelming high-quality WP:INDEPENDENT WP:SECONDARY coverage supports a more human pronoun; this, to me, reflects both our sourcing policy and our current practice. -- Aquillion ( talk) 07:06, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
- The simplest solution to me seems to be to use whatever pronouns the subject's developers use when referring to their creation. If the developers use she/her, use she/her. If it's he/him, then use he/him. If they/them, then use they/them. With some exceptions, chatbots and conversational AIs seem fit into a middle ground between pure software packages and fictional characters. Where the bot is gendered by its creator, it makes sense to refer to it by whatever gendered terms and pronouns are contextually appropriate.
Sideswipe9th (
talk) 17:47, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
- No primary/secondary source distinction here? –
.Raven
.talk 00:19, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- Good question. Were it not for the crossover between chatbots being pure software and fictional characters, I would say defer primarily to secondary sources. But because there often is a crossover, and particularly where the bot's creator is intention is for the bot to be semiotically
gender coded I think deferring to authorial intent is the better approach here.
Sideswipe9th (
talk) 00:36, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- No primary/secondary source distinction. Our articles have to mean what the reliable sources mean, but they don't have to use the words the reliable sources use. We have to write articles in
WP:OUROWNWORDS.—
S Marshall
T/
C 14:37, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- I would argue we should rely solely on secondary sources for this, and completely disregard primary or non- WP:INDEPENDENT ones. Primary sources (ie. companies rolling out chatbots) have extremely strong incentives to humanize them in the eyes of the public, since it makes them seem more impressive than they may actually be. This makes primary sources bad ones the question of whether we should use that framing in our own article voice, in the same way that we wouldn't use a primary source for any other wording that might imply that a piece of tech is extraordinary or groundbreaking. We could quote or attribute eg. Amazon's statements that "Alexa is basically human!" or whatever, but to use Amazon as a primary source to guide our article-voice treatment in that direction seems inappropriate. -- Aquillion ( talk) 06:57, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
- No primary/secondary source distinction. Our articles have to mean what the reliable sources mean, but they don't have to use the words the reliable sources use. We have to write articles in
WP:OUROWNWORDS.—
S Marshall
T/
C 14:37, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- Good question. Were it not for the crossover between chatbots being pure software and fictional characters, I would say defer primarily to secondary sources. But because there often is a crossover, and particularly where the bot's creator is intention is for the bot to be semiotically
gender coded I think deferring to authorial intent is the better approach here.
Sideswipe9th (
talk) 00:36, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- Agreed. DFlhb ( talk) 11:50, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
- No primary/secondary source distinction here? –
.Raven
.talk 00:19, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
- I would use "human" pronouns for AIs only if the majority of high-quality secondary sources do. I wouldn't rely on primary or non- WP:INDEPENDENT sources for that - this isn't a gender issue, it's a "do we portray the AI as if it were a person?" issue. And primary sources are going to have a strong incentive to humanize their AIs, since that makes them seem more impressive; we shouldn't accept that framing unless secondary sources do. I also think that this is different from fictional characters in that, when we use human pronouns for a fictional character, we're clearly doing so in a "fictional context", which most readers will understand; whereas when we refer to an AI as "he" or "she", we're risking an implicit statement of "this AI is, in some sense, an actual person" and are encouraging the reader to think of them way. That's perhaps a complicated philosophical or social question, which is why we should leave it up to secondary sources; and I would argue that the implication of "this AI is, in fact, a person" is currently an WP:EXCEPTIONAL claim, hence we should require an actual majority among high-quality stories and not eg. a single "wow-isn't-this-cool" puff piece. Obviously if "strong" AI ever does become a thing, this would change completely, but that's not the case at the moment. -- Aquillion ( talk) 06:53, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
- I know I'm a week after much of this conversation but the tag is still there. I don't think there is a lot of risk to deferring to independent sources to override a default of "it". I agree that we should not rely on primary sources. I think the level of reliability of those sources is up for debate. Eg. if virtually all the UGC uses one pronoun, but the most reliable media has not picked it up, I think there's a "common parlance" argument to be made to allow use of either/both pronounces as is appropriate. More generally, I think we should also avoid guidelines to enforce consistency if what we consider reliable sources use differing/multiple pronouns, and allow editors to let the article settle on its own towards one or multiple, whatever appropriate. — siro χ o 20:59, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
- There seems to be a few different things being discussed above, ranging from chatbots whose developers are incentivized to try to humanize them with human pronouns all the way to fictional characters like C3PO or Bender from Futurama. In the case of fictional characters, at least, I would be against degendering the characters' pronouns. These characters are ultimately fictional persons - strong AI - even if not human per se; we should defer to how sources refer to them, which is usually as he or she. As for chatbots and such, I don't have an opinion on that right now. Crossroads -talk- 23:05, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
This style guide is mandating misgendering, and does no justice nor gives any respect to people who's pronouns happen to be neopronouns. If a person's pronouns are ze/zir, then zir Wikipedia article should continuously reflect that, and should not misgender them by using the singular they. 67.241.70.141 ( talk) 03:18, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
- What gender does ze/zir denote? What gender does the singular they denote? What is the difference?
Mitch Ames (
talk) 03:21, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
- It depends? I don't have sources; I doubt there... Are many. Forgive me for talking about what is 100% original research.
- My neopronouns (ve/ver/verself) sort of reflect the fact that my understanding of my gender is as a sort of floating signifier; I have a gender, absolutely, and it is not male nor female nor in between and it is signified only by itself, and I suppose by me. This is in contrast to they/them, which doesn't actually resonate as truly neutral to me; it feels like it doesn't reflect 'ambiguity', but rather a gender that is signified by a particular sort of ambiguity; and that gender feels as alien to me as maleness or femaleness.
- I've heard other trans people who dislike they/them, or prefer other pronouns over they/them say similar things, fwiw. 136.35.180.148 ( talk) 17:09, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
- Agreed, this is just blatant bigotry. Wikipedia is mandating that neopronoun users be misgendered, and this is just completely unacceptable for anyone who has morals. How is Wikipedia supposed to be a source of trusted information if users are required to misgender trans people? I exclusively use neopronouns. My pronouns are not they/them. Misgendering me and other trans people who use neopronouns is not "professional", it's just blatant bigotry, and is just going to make it harder for trans people to gain acceptance in our society if Wikipedia is going to forcibly hold people back from learning the most basic form of respect for us! Using our pronouns!
73.21.37.82 (
talk) 02:36, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thank you for saying this!!! I'm lucky in that I'm okay with they/them pronouns as well as my neopronouns, but that is not the case for everyone.
- For example: author Maia Kobabe, who exclusively uses e/em/eir pronouns.
- It's unacceptable that e is repeatedly misgendered on the wiki page for eir book, Gender Queer, despite that book literally being about eir gender journey. How is it professional to completely ignore the background of an autobiography?
- When was this arbitrary decision about what is and isn't proper even made? (SEE EDIT)
- It's not like we can't just put a footnote after the pronoun to clarify. It's used on pages for people who use they/them pronouns (e.g. Lil Uzi Vert) so I don't see why we couldn't do the same for neopronouns.
- EDIT: Alright, there was a discussion had about this some time ago, but the conclusion supposedly reached does not align with what I've seen neopronoun users say.
- If one were refer to someone who only uses she/her pronouns with they/them pronouns, that would still be misgendering. Same with someone who exclusively uses he/him pronouns. I don't see why neopronouns are an exception. Sure, it's not conventional, but being nonbinary isn't either. What's so hard to respect?
-
Rainbowlack (
talk) 11:41, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
- The whole point of they / them is that those words are not gendered - the words " avoid reference towards a particular sex or gender". You cannot misgender someone by using a term that has no gender. Referring to someone as " they" instead of he/she/e is no more misgendering than referring to them as a person instead of a male/female/..., or referring to someone as a "police officer" instead of a policeman or policewoman, or referring to me (a cisgender male) as "that Wikipedia editor" instead of "him". They/them might not be a person's preferred pronouns but those words are not misgendering anyone. Mitch Ames ( talk) 12:26, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
- This dispute hinges on the meaning of the word 'transphobic'. Is the idea that the use of the
singular they is "transphobic" a logical idea? Well, the singular they was invented so that subject's gender is not identified. So is it transphobic to not identify the subject's gender at all because they do not prefer he/him or she/her pronouns? That depends on the meaning of the word "transphobic". If it is transphobic, then a further question is: what is the weight of that transphobia? Does it outweigh the need for consistency and readability?
JM (
talk) 14:49, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
- The section is
This Style Guide is Transphobic
, but the OP's statement is thatThis style guide is mandating misgendering ... Wikipedia article ... should not misgender them by using the singular they
. "Transphobic" and "misgendering" are not the same thing. Mitch Ames ( talk) 00:43, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
- The section is
If a subject uses multiple pronouns with no defined preference, e.g. Emma Seligman using both she/her and they/them pronouns, should the article consistently use the same pronouns for the subject, and how to determine which to use? Bklibcat67 ( talk) 19:00, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
- There isn't a hard-and-fast rule, nor should there be, but in general we should use the one they most favor, or if there's no stated preference then the one they list first. In rare cases where there's no consistent order in which they list pronouns (which in fairness I did for a while, on purpose), then I would treat it like MOS:ENGVAR or MOS:ERA: just use whatever the first editor of the article uses. As to consistency, the only time I can think of where it would make sense to be inconsistent is if the subject requests it and gives some well-defined rule, e.g. "I take she/her pronouns, or they/them for times prior to my transition" or "I take he/him pronouns in my personal capacity, but she/her when pertaining to my drag career". We should not, say, be alternating between she and they in an article just because a subject takes she/they. -- Tamzin[ cetacean needed (they|xe|she) 19:07, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
- Failing to be consistent with the usage of a subject's pronouns in an article would make it extremely confusing as to whom any particular instance of a pronoun is referring. JM ( talk) 14:52, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
- The discussion at Talk:Celia Rose Gooding#RfC on pronouns attempted to address a preference for any pronoun over another pronoun, and resolved without a clear consensus, but it seems pretty clear that alternating between pronouns was not considered as a strong option. There was some support for the idea that pronoun order is relevant (the RFC closer suggested that there was dispute on this, but as far as I can tell, that was a mistake). — HTGS ( talk) 21:04, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
User:Mathglot and others,
The section concerning pre-coming-out photos states "The article about
The Wachowskis, for example, is better without any pre-coming-out photos since the way they looked is not well known as they shied away from public appearances.", but the article concerning them has pre-coming-out photos,
this, so I think it is a bad idea to have contradictory information.
So I think that either the example should be changed on this page, or the photo should be changed on that page.
I can do stuff! (
talk) 01:27, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
-
Icandostuff Thanks for finding that; I was unaware of it. You have a very good point, and I don't know which is right. At first glance, I think the photos at
The Wachowskis should be changed, but I'd like to hear what others have to say. It's contradictory now, but the sky won't fall if it's inconsistent for a little while; let's have a wider discussion about this, and see where it goes. What do you think should happen here? Thanks again,
Mathglot (
talk) 02:36, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
- Personally, I think that that part of the policy is well thought-out, so I think that the image should be removed from their article. Though, I think that a good example is needed there, so I don't really know.
- Personally, I think that that part of the policy is well thought-out, so I think that the image should be removed from their article. Though, I think that a good example is needed there, so I don't really know.
- Thank You User:Mathglot, I can do stuff! ( talk) 03:35, 22 March 2024 (UTC)