Hey! Fellow queer editor here – it’s great to see more of us around to advance the gay agenda
improve wikiHow and support the Mission
I hear you and agree on the lack of gender inclusiveness – as a trans person, this honestly bothers me a lot, and I usually take the effort to neutralize gendered language where I see it. It’s not malicious; some editors just don’t use singular they/them because they were taught to use “he/she” by an English teacher who’s a stickler for gender-exclusive grammar, and back around 2015 and earlier, the writing guidelines for our contracted editors (the ones who edit through WRM/Seymour Edits) required them to use gendered pronouns. That requirement’s been dropped since, and I do see a lot
more editors using singular they/them and neutralizing gendered pronouns nowadays, so I think a lot of the gendered pronouns are just old. Anyone is absolutely welcome to change gendered pronouns to gender-neutral ones if they see them, and I’d really encourage them to do so!
I’d imagine the same applies to articles like Be a Good Wife (which, even though it’s definitely developed a lot over the years, was originally created in 2005). I think the relationship articles tend to be “inclusivity snags” in general because we’re a collaborative project, and not everyone is equally aware of the problems around exclusivity. A fair amount of editors here are straight and inclusivity doesn’t always actively cross their mind because, well, heteronormativity. And of course, in those articles, anyone’s welcome to change that kind of thing too – I personally tend to write “partner” or “spouse” rather than anything gendered, or “trade off” gendered terms in any example statements. (For instance, if I write a step on using “I” language, I might include one example referring to a boyfriend, one referring to a wife, and one that’s completely gender-neutral.)
The one thing I will mention is that wikiHow does serve a very broad audience, and we can’t assume that the readers are all going to be up-to-speed on LGBT+ identity. To be clear, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for inclusivity where we can – it just means that sometimes, total gender or sexuality inclusivity isn’t possible, because trying to achieve it could cause it to read awkwardly or confuse someone who’s not educated on the topic (and isn’t on an article devoted specifically to it). As an example, I once worked on an ADHD article where I had to distinguish between “boys” and “girls” with ADHD; I hated it, but writing “people assigned male at birth with ADHD” or “people with ADHD who were assigned female” was too unwieldy, and not everyone knows the terms AFAB or AMAB. In some cases, we have to opt for what’s most understandable to the broader audience, even when it feels exclusive. (And I understand how gross it feels… I wish we lived in a world where AMAB/AFAB were part of the common lexicon outside of queer spaces.)
There are certain articles, too, where it’s fine for the title or content to be gendered, because that’s the target audience. For example, in “Take Care of Black Girls’ Hair,” the target audience is black girls; black boys (and to some extent, black enbies) are less likely to be looking for the same hair care tips as black girls, because the beauty standards are different. But for that, it’s also okay to have a completely gender-neutral title or article on the topic – for instance, we could have an article titled something like “Take Care of African Hair” that centers around black hair care in general, without gendering the reader. (I did take a brief look and it seems like we don’t have a lot of Black hair-care articles in general, so that’d be a really great category for us to improve on in general!)
When it comes to the LGBT category specifically, I don’t think we can actually put a plus sign there – past versions of MediaWiki haven’t properly supported special characters in category names (though I’m not sure if that’s changed), and special characters can mess up tools like the Categorizer that are dependent on the category tree. The category itself was created in 2007, too, when there wasn’t the same amount of awareness about LGBT+ identity; it wasn’t out of a deliberate intent to be exclusive. Since most of our readers find articles through the search bar and LGBT is still considered part of the correct terminology, I don’t think we need to worry too much about that one.
I definitely love seeing the push for inclusivity, especially since this is something I’ve noticed more and more wikiHowians advocating for in recent years! And this actually gives me an idea… @JayneG
is on vacation at the moment, but I know staff is able to pull batches of articles from our databases, and I’m wondering if maybe this could prompt a more widescale project for volunteer editors. Jayne, is there a way that someone could compile a Google Sheet of articles containing terms like “his/her” or “he/she” for the community to review and neutralize where appropriate?
