Property talk:P6553

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personal pronoun
personal pronoun(s) this person goes by

Represents	personal pronouns (Q65067284)
Data type	Lexeme
Domain	human (Q5) or fictional character (Q95074)
Example	Chelsea Manning (Q298423) → no label (L484) Lucas Werkmeister (Q57387675) → no label (L485) no label (L41654) Tim Morley (Q14198325) → no label (L485) no label (L43384) no label (L43387) no label (L9257)
See also	sex or gender (P21)
Lists	Items with the most statements of this property Count of items by number of statements (chart) Items with the most statements Items with the fewest statements Count of items by number of sitelinks (chart) Items with the most sitelinks Items with the most sitelinks, but no link to one Wikipedia (sample: Welsh Wikipedia, cywiki) Items with the fewest sitelinks Most linked wikis Items with the most identifier properties Items with no other statements Most recently created items Items with novalue claims Items with unknown value claims Usage history (total) Usage history (main statement) Chart by item creation date Map of people by place values: place of birth educated at work location residence place of death place of burial January 1st dates People with date of birth on January 1 People with date of death on January 1 People with both dates on January 1 Database reports/Constraint violations/P6553 Map Random list
Living people protection class	property likely to be challenged (Q44597997), property that may violate privacy (Q44601380)
Proposal discussion	Proposal discussion
Current uses	Total 5,855 Main statement 5,820 99.4% of uses Qualifier 34 0.6% of uses Reference 1 <0.1% of uses
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[create Create a translatable help page (preferably in English) for this property to be included here]

Type “human (Q5), fictional character (Q95074)”: item must contain property “instance of (P31)” with classes “human (Q5), fictional character (Q95074)” or their subclasses (defined using subclass of (P279)). (Help)

List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P6553#Type Q5, Q95074, hourly updated report, SPARQL

Lexical category of value: pronoun (Q36224), personal pronoun (Q468801): this property should only use values with these lexical categories

Exceptions are possible as rare values may exist. Exceptions can be specified using exception to constraint (P2303).
List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P6553#lexical category

Citation needed: the property must have at least one reference (Help)

Exceptions are possible as rare values may exist. Exceptions can be specified using exception to constraint (P2303).
List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P6553#citation needed

Scope is as main value (Q54828448): the property must be used by specified way only (Help)

Exceptions are possible as rare values may exist. Exceptions can be specified using exception to constraint (P2303).
List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P6553#Scope, SPARQL

Allowed entity types are Wikibase item (Q29934200): the property may only be used on a certain entity type (Help)

Exceptions are possible as rare values may exist. Exceptions can be specified using exception to constraint (P2303).
List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P6553#Entity types

"preferred"

This property should be renamed. People don't prefer to be identified with a specific pronoun no more than I prefer to be called by my name instead of Bob. I suggest instead we use "gender pronoun" as a best practice. Ckoerner (talk) 15:47, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

Agreed, this term is widely considered offensive Jaredzimmerman (talk) 17:26, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

I have to agree. I think a better name would just be "pronoun" (although "gender pronoun" is also good). "Preferred" can also always be an alias. Perryprog (talk) 17:19, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

I've changed it to "personal pronoun" since that was already an alias and it seems to be far more common than "gender pronoun". I don't think "pronoun" on its own is a good idea because it would be more likely to be misused for non-human items. A lot of the labels in other languages still say the equivalent of "preferred" though. - Nikki (talk) 03:58, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

@Nikki:, this is a great choice; thank you. Perryprog (talk) 04:11, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

@Ckoerner,@Perryprog, @Nikki: @Ash Crow mentioned in the property proposal that "preferred pronoun" stresses that «it is a personal choice from the subject of the item, not a matter of opinion from the contributors or external sources - and so, we cannot accept "he" as a value for Chelsea Manning (Q298423) because some transphobic paper uses it». Besides, some languages still use the variation "preferred", like in Catalan, in which we only have reliable sources yet to use the term "preferred pronoun" or "preferred gender pronoun". I don't know how it is in other languages like German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian... I understand the opposition to the word "prefer", but I can't change it in Catalan for the moment without breaking WD:V. This discussion reminds me of the classic debate about sexual preference (Q2275640) and sexual orientation (Q17888). On the other hand, @VIGNERON noted in the discussion below about the limits of deductions and references, that some pronouns are not used in a gendered sense. For example, Julius Caesar used "they" with a different meaning than non-binary people use it nowadays (see Illeism). Therefore, I am wondering if the property should include only those pronouns that have a gender significance or if it should include any kind of pronoun.--Sjoel (talk) 22:01, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

add time qualifier?

Preferred pronouns can change over time. For example, poet Raquel Salas Rivera Q61852721 expressed a preference for the use of "they" in 2018/2019 but as of June 2020, uses "he". There are repeated edits and reversions on the Wikipedia page w:en:Raquel Salas Rivera which do not reflect this person's currently stated preference. Adding a time-based qualifier to individual values for pronoun usage in Wikidata might be helpful in identifying and tracking appropriate preferred pronoun usage. e.g. for Salas Rivera, "they" could be marked 2018-2019 and "he" could be qualified as a statement from 7 June 2020. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 04:06, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Distinguishing between no pronouns and any pronouns

Currently using any pronouns (e.g. Nicky Case (Q19680180)) and using no pronouns at all (e.g. sj Miller (Q29016953)) are both represented with "no value". I'm unsure how we should distinguish between these two cases. GreenComputer (talk) 16:00, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

I'm also wondering how we should handle this. Currently this property can only use lexemes. Would it make sense to create a special lexeme, just for this usage? I fell like this sort of data-type concern should be sent to someone who knows some back end stuff, because I don't. Not sure who exactly to ping. OmegaFallon (talk) 22:15, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

How should we deal with multilinguism?

I have added the French pronoun for Q6375824#P6553. So there a value in English and a value in French. Should we add a value for each language? How should we qualify the language? PAC2 (talk) 08:41, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

As I understand, the reference for EACH value is mandatory. So, pronouns in any language must be admitted/demanded by the subject. We, as editors, can not deduct translations assuming that person agree with them.

How to qualify the language?.... this property doesn't need language qualifier associated, because lexemes already have only one language associated. Amadalvarez (talk) 16:45, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

It does, because some people explicitly don't use any pronouns in a specific language but do use pronouns in another. Example: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q61735940&oldid=2026526784 --Universalamateur (talk) 01:29, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

A qualifier with language of work or name (P407) would seem to suggest itself at least
• in cases of personal pronoun (P6553)no value; and possibly also
• in cases where the person X described by the item goes, in A-language contexts, by a pronoun that is a loanword from a language B with A ≠ B, for example ‘person X’ (Qxxx)personal pronoun (P6553)they (L371)language of work or name (P407)German (Q188). ―BlaueBlüte (talk) 13:14, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Deductions may be ciscentric and break verifiability

It seems wrong to me to derive the pronoun from the P21 value. First, because it breaks the principle of verifiability, and second, because it assumes that everyone is cisgender, if they don't state the contrary (ciscentrism). Besides, at least in the languages that I know, Spanish and Catalan, some binary people also use different pronouns than the one that corresponds to their gender identity (man/woman). Furthermore, some gender identity values (P21) in Wikidata are assumed from the sex of the person, a derivation that may be wrong too (and is ciscentric). So I believe that the personal pronoun can only be known with accuracy if the person has stated it (and therefore, we have the corresponding reference) Sjoel (talk) 19:45, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

I agree with @Sjoel. Not only derived from P21, but also using as a reference any text where the default grammatical value of the pronoun (he/she) has been written. This is a false reference because a) if the text is in the third person, it means that it was not written by the person; b) in the Wikidata:Property proposal/personal pronoun, several editors support conditioned to "do not infer and only use the person statement" and "only to create when the correct value cannot be deducted by default from P21".

In short, we seem to have forgotten the accepted conditions for creating this property and some of us are filling in the items that don't need this information based on the inferred references. Amadalvarez (talk) 21:10, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

CC. @Ash Crow, @Amire80, @Robin van der Vliet, For your information. Amadalvarez (talk) 21:35, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

I agree with what has been commented so far. The property should be fully independent from P21 and request always a specific reference to validate it in which the individuals refer to themselves with such pronoun. Xavier Dengra (talk) 11:02, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

@Sjoel: it does seem very wrong (especially as this property requires a reference and a deduction is not a reference) but what are we talking about here? I did a query and I don't see any item doing a deduction, do you have any example? Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 14:51, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: There are many items about people that haven't stated what their personal pronoun are. For instance, George Washington, who wasn't alive when the topic of personal pronouns started, has "he" as a personal pronoun, with a source that mentions that he was a man. The source is not even stating anything about what Washington himself said about his gender. Like in Washington, there are hundreds of these cases assuming gender identities and personal pronouns.--Sjoel (talk) 19:47, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

@Sjoel: mhh, indeed George Washington (Q23) is strange (I'll let GreenComputer explain why they add it, personnaly I would remove it). That said, I don't see any deduction here, it is de facto the pronoun used by this person (and pronoun has been here for millenias). That said, it begs the question : should this property be used only for self-declaration or for all declaration? it's not clear, in fact the second is strangely more-or-less implied right now and that should be clarified.

Regardless of this question and more concerning, looking into this property, I found 457 items (and 497 statements) where there is no reference at all : https://w.wiki/5boR ; for a total of 4137 items (and 4417 statements) using this property, that's 11 % ! Moreover, there is 1772 items (and 1774 statements) with Wikimedia import URL (P4656) : https://w.wiki/5boh, which is obviously not a reference. So a total of 54 % of items that need to be fixed! Thanks for raising the issue, we indeed need to work and correct that.

Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 17:40, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: In relation to your first question, if the personal pronoun is the pronoun that a person wants others to use when they talk with/about him/her/they (so an internal decision, important to add in wikidata I'd say to avoid missgendering), what is the point of deducing the personal pronoun without a statement from the person, based on the gender that others recognize in that person, which may or may not match the gender with which the person self-identifies? In the example of Washington, he was treated as a male by society, but did he want others to treat him as man and to use "he" as his personal pronoun? Did he consider himself a man? Do we have to assume that everyone is cisgender if they haven't said the contrary? Morover, the "personal pronoun" is a category that has been created recently, so in the case of people that have died before, are we applying a social construct to the past when may haven't existed? So, are we rewriting the past? Furthermore, do we add any relevant information if we write "he" as a personal pronoun, basing the decision on the English grammar that prescribes that "he" is the corresponding pronoun for a man? All these questions may need clarification... In relation to all these statements without references, it also looks clear to me that we have a problem here. However, I would propose to clarify first the question above, so all those that have been using this property discuss to agree on how we have to use it.--Sjoel (talk) 22:37, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

@Sjoel: « if the personal pronoun is the pronoun that a person wants others to use » that a big "if" and a specific definition, which may or may not apply to this property (it probably does - more or less - but as I said, it's not clear). The broad and common definition is more on the line of « pronoun refering to a person », note that self-reference is not include here and this definition is not new at all. Counter-example: since millenias, it's not unusual for people referred to themselves with the third person (it's so common it even has a name illeism (Q1658762)) ; Julius Caesar is a well known example, so we do know their self-preference even if they died a long time ago. I'm not sure what we should do about them, but in any case, we need to be clear and be clear in the property itself. We should also make corresponding constraints (like if we only go with the modern sense, then we should limit to modern people) and clean the labels/descriptions (the discussion above advised against using the term "preferred" but many language - including German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Catalan to name only a few - do use a variation of "preferred"... this is inconsistent). Finally, I'm pretty sure a good solution is to enforce more strictly the references constraint (and true references), it would prevent most of the issues (like we could delete more than half of the current use). Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 17:46, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: There was an emerging consensus in the discussion of the property proposal on clarifying that this property should contain the subject's preferences and not common pronouns used by others. In this regard, it was mentioned, for instance, that Chelsea Manning (Q298423) has been referred with the pronoun "he" in some sources, which is a form of transphobia. Not all references should be OK. Therefore, the definition of "pronoun referring to a person" should be narrowed to not allow discrimination. On the other hand, as you said that Julius Cesar used "they" as a preferred/personal pronoun (and we have reliable sources that testifies so), I would reject time constrains since it seems that it is not only a "modern thing" (for the moment I don't reject that it may be modern when in comes to the sense of gender). Moreover, this example, together with illeism (Q1658762), provide extra arguments to reject deductions from sex or gender (P21). In this sense, @Ash Crow also argued in the property proposal that «some non-binary people use only gender-neutral pronouns while some others use both "they" and "she"». I would add too that some binary people in Spain (specially in the gay community) use both "he" and "she". So, deductions should not be accepted, and neither references that only include a personal pronoun as a subject of a sentence, like @Amadalvarez mentioned. In relation to the discussion about "preferred pronoun" vs "personal pronoun", I continue in the section above. It would be great to hear the opinion of those who participated in the property proposal @Lucas Werkmeister:@Yair rand:@Jura1:@Jsamwrites:@MichaelSchoenitzer:@Robin van der Vliet:@Amire80:@Catherine Laurence:. And also those that have used it so far. I've add only some users. If you know how to find all of them please ping them. @GreenComputer:@Macocobovi:@Lieutcoluseng:@Woko Sapien:@Valentina.Anitnelav:. --Sjoel (talk) 21:17, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Just to clarify, almost every time I've added this property, I've cited the subject's personal website as the source. While this doesn't solve the issue with historical figures, I think citing the pronouns contemporary figures use on their personal websites is within reason.--Woko Sapien (talk) 21:33, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

As far as I recall, I have only used this property where the concerned person announced their personal pronouns on social media. And I completely agree that we must only use it for the persons who have explicitly announced their preference and must not deduce it (in any form). John Samuel (talk) 09:14, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Per earlier discussions: This property should only be ever used with a reference to the subject's explicit preference. --Yair rand (talk) 07:44, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

@Yair rand: maybe but it's not clear in the property itself and it's vastly not followed: at least by 54 % of the items (see the queries above). Should we do a massive clean-up? (I could launch OpenRefine and remove them very easily and quickly, but I would prefer to give opportunity to people to add references first). And what about edge cases like Julius Caesar? I think we should add some precision to be really clear. Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 16:48, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: I found in the policy about living people that "anything that's individually challenged or might be challenged should be supported by a reliable public source or may be subject to removal. In particular properties that are living people protection class (P8274) property likely to be challenged (Q44597997) should be supported by suitable references when applied to living people. In the case of a dispute, the burden of evidence rests with the editor who adds or restores material." Personally, I would send first a message to those who added the data. But it seems hard to do since it represents more than two thousand items... Do you know if there is any way to do it easily? Afterwards, if the data is not changed and since it is sensitive, I would remove it when it's not referenced or it's deducted from Wikipedia (which is not a reference to the subject's explicit preference). Sjoel (talk) 20:55, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

@Sjoel: yes, there is Wikidata:Living people but more directly, this property has citation needed constraint (Q54554025). Not sure, if we can easily find who added this property without references but NavelGazer says that Macocobovi (already pinged above) added 1/4 of the statements and looking at the edit, it seems that most are without references (and yes, obviously Wikimedia import URL (P4656) is not a reference). It seems that Abdullahalaba works on (more or less) the same items and is also responsible for some referenceless statements. I don't have much time right now but if someone could contact them, it would be a good start. Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 08:03, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: All right, I’ll do it. Sjoel (talk) 06:27, 29 August 2022 (UTC)