Author gender consistency

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Author gender consistency

1norabelle414
aug 18, 2021, 1:31 pm

Now that there are pretty new charts and graphs there would be some advantages to a little consistency when adding author gender. Obviously everyone's identity should be respected first and foremost but are there any thoughts on minor punctuation differences, e.g.:

non-binary or nonbinary
trans masculine or transmasculine or trans-masculine
nonbinary/transmasculine or transmasculine/nonbinary or trans masculine non-binary

2norabelle414
Bewerkt: aug 18, 2021, 1:33 pm

I think I'm going to go with "nonbinary" when adding a new author gender because that variation seems to be used slightly more, but I could very easily be convinced otherwise.

I don't feel strongly enough about it to change any "non-binary" entries to "nonbinary", at the moment.

3norabelle414
aug 18, 2021, 1:39 pm

Another question:

Should truly "unknown" authors (e.g. the author of Beowulf) have the author gender "unknown", or should we lump them in with the previous gender "other/contested/unknown" (from when there were radio buttons instead of free text)

4cpg
aug 18, 2021, 1:59 pm

>1 norabelle414:

Maybe use the punctuation that the author in question uses.

5timspalding
Bewerkt: aug 18, 2021, 3:33 pm

>3 norabelle414:

I'd favor breaking up "other/contested/unknown." But it's a lot.

Abby's has one author whose gender is marked "secret." Alas, no clicking to find out.

6norabelle414
aug 18, 2021, 3:52 pm

Some discussion going on here (message 122 onward) about whether the system should combine "nonbinary" and "non-binary" within charts and graphs. That does seems like it would solve some problems in cases where neither option is specifically "correct".
https://www.librarything.com/topic/334488#7581531

>4 cpg: That would certainly be the most respectful default option, but it's hard to say if an author has a particular preference for a hyphen or not for gender reasons or just grammar reasons. Or if the grammatic decision was made for them by an editor.

7karenb
Bewerkt: aug 18, 2021, 4:41 pm

>4 cpg: I've been going with whatever I find in the author's own words, wherever possible. Of course, editors are everywhere, even on web sites. That seems to be the most respectful option, and until today the concatenation wasn't really an issue.

Would it be too difficult to get the charts to ignore punctuation, or at least hyphens? (I have no idea.) (ETA:) I see that they ignore capitalization, now, which is a plus.

8norabelle414
aug 18, 2021, 5:06 pm

>7 karenb: I think that would be my preference as well. If the charts could ignore punctuation and spacing, then it wouldn't really matter if the entry says "nonbinary" or "non-binary" or "non binary"

9LolaWalser
aug 18, 2021, 5:32 pm

Capitalisation seems to be a problem, I have thousands under "male" but also one entry showing separately as "Male". Roger Marshall

https://www.librarything.com/author/marshallroger

10spiphany
Bewerkt: aug 19, 2021, 1:40 am

For anyone using non-English versions of the site: my understanding from the original thread announcing the change is that this field wasn't designed to be multilingual like the rest of CK. So presumably genders should be entered in English to prevent non-English gender terms from being separated in the graphs from their English equivalents.

The thread is a bit confusing because Tim later mentions adding some kind of function that would recognize the most common equivalents of "male", "female", etc. in other languages and automatically convert them, but it wasn't clear to me whether this was implemented or not.

Contradicting this, the grey instructions that appear below the CK field when editing suggests that users should enter the gender terms in their language -- i.e., the German version of LT suggests "männlich" and "weiblich" rather than "male" and "female".

There was a bug at one point which meant that gender data entered on one of the non-English LT sites wasn't being recognized in the statistics. Does anyone know if this has been fixed?

11anglemark
aug 19, 2021, 3:06 am

>10 spiphany: The "grey" instructions are from before this field was changed. I changed that guidance text on the Swedish site, so just change it on the German site as well.

12MarthaJeanne
Bewerkt: aug 19, 2021, 3:40 am

>10 spiphany: Is not fixed.
example https://www.librarything.com/author/ehalthubertchristian
shows in my list of not set.

This dates from when the field went from buttons to free text.

I did not correct this one like I normally do when I come across it.

BTW, it is not immediately obvious on .com that this information is from the German site.

13spiphany
aug 19, 2021, 3:47 am

>11 anglemark: I don't think the message predates the new field -- it also mentions the free-text option which wasn't there before.

I'm not a native speaker so I've avoided touching the site translation, even though there are plenty of translations that sound odd to me. (I mostly use the de site because it displays titles by German authors in German rather than in English, and also so I can log in simultaneously with a second wishlist account using the English site. Misleading translations of LT site information is an issue of its own which would likely digress from this thread too much.)

In any case, there seems to be a lack of clear instruction as to exactly what people using the non-English sites are supposed to be entering in the gender field -- though at the moment I guess maybe it is a moot point since entries on the non-English sites aren't being recognized in the statistics anyway.

14anglemark
Bewerkt: aug 19, 2021, 9:53 am

>13 spiphany: If it's a new message then whoever translated it didn't know that it should be in English, i.e. didn't read about the change in New Features. I see that there is no translation guidance for that one, which is usually present in the form of a NOTE when needed, so that was an obvious mistake. In Swedish, the grey text reads: "Write in English: "female," "male," "n/a" or something better suited".

15norabelle414
aug 19, 2021, 8:42 am

>10 spiphany: If he does not plan to have the site recognize "female" and "Female" as the same, I can't imagine he's going to have it recognize across languages.

>12 MarthaJeanne: Ah that explains why I was so confused about "not a person". I had an author whose gender was listed as "unknown" but they were showing up on the chart as "not a person" because someone had entered "n/a" in a different language's CK.

16spiphany
Bewerkt: aug 19, 2021, 9:26 am

>15 norabelle414:
In the original thread Tim writes (post 1) "Not translated. I don't currently have a good answer for this. I don't want to split the field up by language, but I also can't translate free text."

And then in post 3 "I suspect the solution to this is to get local translations for the top X genders, so genders show up right in other languages, and if someone uses them, it translates them back into English." But there's no follow-up on whether he did anything about this.

I've been assuming we should enter gender in English, but it's clear that not everyone has been doing so. Which is why I brought it up, since we're discussing best practices.

17timspalding
aug 19, 2021, 11:47 am

Gender is complicated and non-English translations tip it over into true mess. I have no good answers for how to do non-English genders, so we're going to have to go with English ones for now.

18Nicole_VanK
Bewerkt: aug 19, 2021, 12:14 pm

>17 timspalding: Usage is indeed also very much depending on culture. I don't think we will ever find a version that's accepted worldwide

ETA: except maybe for "whatever" on all ;)

19norabelle414
aug 19, 2021, 12:24 pm

>17 timspalding: How do we go with English genders? Is that chart going to only pull from the English CK? or will people need to go through every language CK and remove each entry or change it to English?

20timspalding
aug 19, 2021, 1:02 pm

>19 norabelle414:

The field is unitary. There is no separate CK for other languages for this field.

21norabelle414
aug 19, 2021, 4:13 pm

>20 timspalding: You can definitely enter different gender CK for different languages, though it does seem to only pull the English CK for the chart (possibly even if the English is "not set" but there are entries on other language CKs? I'm still poking around)

22timspalding
aug 19, 2021, 9:07 pm

>21 norabelle414:

You can enter is on different sites--all of them. But it all goes in one bucket. If you change the gender on German it will change it on English; if you change it on English it will change it on German.

23norabelle414
aug 19, 2021, 10:53 pm

>22 timspalding: I don't think that's true. I logged into the .fr site and changed saltmanz to "Homme" and now he shows as "male" in English CK and "Homme" in French CK

24Cynfelyn
aug 20, 2021, 1:45 pm

>23 norabelle414: I logged into the .fr site and changed saltmanz to "Homme" and now he shows as "male" in English CK and "Homme" in French CK

I find with some CK fields that logging on to a language site to edit CK is more likely to create localised CK, while simply changing language at the top of CK pro-forma overwrites the pre-existing CK.

Something similar for other fields was reported in https://www.librarything.com/topic/327497

25norabelle414
aug 20, 2021, 1:58 pm

>24 Cynfelyn: Interesting.

I logged into the .com site and changed saltmanz's French gender to "unknown". After reloading the page, the French gender is still "Homme" but the English gender has changed from "male" to "unknown"