Auto-generated descriptions use wrong pronouns for transgender people

[Hayden Schiff]

When Mix'n'match suggests possible Wikidata items which correspond to a given external item, it automatically generates a description for that item. When browsing preliminary matches for Politifact IDs, I found that it generated this description for Christine Hallquist (Q56167585): "Christine Hallquist is a US-American politician. He was born on April 11, 1956 in Baldwinsville. He studied at Mohawk Valley Community College." Hallquist is a transgender woman, and referring to her as "he" is likely to cause offense.

In Wikidata, her gender is set to transgender female (Q1052281), so this seems to be a code error and not an issue with the data. Whatever code generates these descriptions needs to be corrected to use feminine pronouns here. I'm guessing that what might have happened here is that the code didn't recognize transgender female (Q1052281), and fell back to he/him/his pronouns as a default. If this is the case, it would probably be a good idea to change the fallback pronouns to they/them/their to avoid causing unintended offense in the future.

(I’ve also started a Meta-Wiki discussion about this, as I wasn’t sure where was the best place to report issues.)