Talk:Sex: Difference between revisions

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Biology B‑class Top‑importance Sex is part of the WikiProject Biology, an effort to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to biology on Wikipedia. Leave messages on the WikiProject talk page.BiologyWikipedia:WikiProject BiologyTemplate:WikiProject BiologyBiology articles B This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. Top This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale. Sexology and sexuality B‑class Top‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Sexology and sexuality, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of human sexuality on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Sexology and sexualityWikipedia:WikiProject Sexology and sexualityTemplate:WikiProject Sexology and sexualitySexology and sexuality articles B This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. Top This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale. Template:WP1.0 Physiology B‑class Top‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physiology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Physiology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PhysiologyWikipedia:WikiProject PhysiologyTemplate:WikiProject PhysiologyPhysiology articles B This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. Top This article has been rated as Top-importance on the importance scale. This article has been classified as relating to the physiology of reproduction.

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Revisions succeeding this version of this article is substantially duplicated by a piece in an external publication. Please do not flag this article as a copyright violation of the following source: Physiological Psychology: Complementary Course of B.Sc Counselling Psychology (PDF), Calicut University, 2014

I'm concerned that the article's reading age may be wildly inappropriate for its likely audience. Would anyone object if I began a series of edits to try to reduce the reading age (particularly of the lede) without intending to change any meanings?—S Marshall T/C 19:40, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As a general principle, I'd have to suggest that rewriting articles for a 'likely audience' shouldn't be done without first stating what you think the 'likely audience' is, and why you think so. AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:35, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I've just done an online Flesch-Kinkaid test by copy/pasting the lede of this article into this tool. The output was: Flesch-Kincaid grade level 13.7; Flesch reading ease score 28.3; reading level college graduate ("very difficult to read"). I'd agree with that assessment. The article clearly has primary authors who're accustomed to writing for undergraduates and/or adults in the top quartile of reading attainment. But, I put it you, the people who're consulting Wikipedia's article about sex are not necessarily in this category: we should be writing for a general audience. The lede in particular should contain a simple explanation of what sex is that could be understood by a curious child.—S Marshall T/C 21:19, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• I was going to go ahead and tentatively change a couple of sentences, but then I found hidden text in the article that specifically asks me to discuss this proposal on talk first. For readability reasons I propose to revise the first two sentences of the article to read:

Living things that reproduce sexually are split into two sexes, male and female. An organism's sex is the trait that decides what gametes it makes.

This is meant to lower the reading age while keeping all the meanings intact. I would welcome your thoughts and criticisms.—S Marshall T/C 15:56, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Usually articles begin with "[Name of article] is..." Not always, but I don't know if this is such a big problem that it should be changed. I don't think we usually go for child-level readability, do we? Might it be better to tweak other parts of the lead? This sentence took a lot of time and back-and-forth to hammer out. Crossroads ^-talk- 05:54, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that shows. Most people don't naturally write sentences that convoluted. On Wikipedia, such sentences mainly come about after a hard fought negotiation in which people want the article to start with different things. But I don't want to change what the first two sentences say. I only want to change how they say it.—S Marshall T/C 09:54, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I propose that the first two sentences be combined into the following:

Sex is a trait in sexually reproducing animals and plants that determines whether the gametes produced by an individual are male or female.

"animals and plants" could optionally be replaced by "organisms". Plantsurfer 10:21, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Awesome! Rephrased into the active voice that might read:

Sex is a trait in sexually reproducing animals and plants that determines whether an individual produces male gametes or female ones.

I prefer "animals and plants" over "organisms".—S Marshall T/C 10:29, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. I'm intrigued. Why are we not saying "Sex is the trait..."?—S Marshall T/C 10:36, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

yes, that would indeed be better imo.Plantsurfer 10:58, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Any objections to

Sex is the trait in sexually reproducing animals and plants that determines whether an individual produces male gametes or female ones.

? Plantsurfer 13:55, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Male and female aren't merely gamete types, though; they are types of the trait itself. How about this: Sex is the trait that determines an individual's reproductive function, male or female, in animals and plants that reproduce sexually. Or: Sex is the trait that determines an individual's reproductive function, male or female, in sexually reproducing species. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:33, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Again, "an individual's reproductive function" is academic-level English. We all might be able to parse a recondite disquisition phrased in that certain delicious sesquipedalian loquaciousness that is the usufruct of an erudite and scholastic education, but... in newspaper-level language please. How about "a creature's job as parent"?—S Marshall T/C 11:00, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A lot of WP articles are written in academic gobbledygook because that’s the level of many contributors to “serious” subjects, just like how many companies/orgs are written in promocruft and many articles about topics English speakers generally don’t care about are written by people who definitely do not speak English at a professional level. Dronebogus (talk) 11:45, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That's certainly true! The task of an encyclopaedist is abridgement: to summarize complex topics for the general public. I think we need to use language at different levels depending on the topic. So for example, it's reasonable to use scholar-level language in Casorati–Weierstrass theorem, because the general public are pretty unlikely to search for that. It's an article by mathematicians for mathematicians. In vital articles like this one, we should be comprehensible to everyone but a moron in a hurry (which is my third-favourite bluelink on Wikipedia). One of the challenges is that proper scientists (quite rightly) have a zeal for rigour and precision, and this leads them to insist on a level of terminological exactness that can be obfuscatory or off-putting for non-scholars.—S Marshall T/C 15:30, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I like this simpler wording.

Please ping me! 12:18, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply

]

Agreed. Dronebogus (talk) 12:25, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if it's too late to comment, but I did like the previous wording better. From what I understand, sex in evolutionary biology is much more than gamete production. If we're trying to present Sex as it relates to the concept in biology (i.e., evolutionary biology), sex is more about reproductive functions than it is about gamete production.

With respect to other editors, although we should balance clarity with correctness, it behooves me to ask who would search on Wikipedia for the term, 'sex,' unless they were intimately interested in a correct definition. A layman, everyday working definition for, 'sex' exists in almost all cultures^{[citation needed]} and even foreign language readers, I hope, can translate their understanding of the word, 'sex' in their language, to the concept of 'sex' in the English language. When we're talking about gamete production for humans as for example teenagers might be interested in, so many other pages on Wikipedia cover this very topic including Man, and Woman.

In addition, simple wikipedia does exist.

I found this page extremely useful when trying to determine the actual meaning of the word, 'sex', when it relates to the technical, scientific, concept. When we claim that, 'sex' is synonymous with gamete production, we dilute the term and this isn't helpful when articles such as these exist. This page deeply helped me understand what the word 'sex' actually means, and by changing the lede we're denying that to other readers. Theheezy (talk) 18:16, 9 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If there's no precedent for making talk pages available only to autoconfirmed users, the recent spate of mischief here might be a good cause to establish such a precedent. Otherwise, what's the procedure for seeking and applying auto confirmation to this talk page? --Kent Dominic·(talk) 04:27, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Article talk pages are semi-protected occasionally, but there has not been enough disruption here. I suspect that a lot of IP comments at Wikipedia in the last few months are from experiments with bots and I use rollback to remove them (assuming they really are off-topic). The procedure is to ask for protection at

WP:RFPP but there would have to be several nonsense posts per day for a few days to get any action. Johnuniq (talk) 05:11, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply

]

IMO any edit from an IP to a talk page that creates a new heading with less than 5 words under it should be reverted by a bot (rather than autosigned as at present). These are invariably something stupid and it's not possible to say anything worthwhile about the page in under 5 words. Won't get all the trolling but it does happen that way on other pages too. Crossroads ^-talk- 06:18, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Gotcha. This article had been off my watchlist for a while, and I was troubled to see the numerous instances of mischief posts that were rightfully deleted. This talk page is proof that unfettered access comes with expected inconvenience. Ce la vie. BTW, the current lede Version 4.2 is tons different from the one I worked on, and it's simpler than the definition in my own lexicon, which has verbiage re X and Y chromosomal norms and deviations. Any lede is way better than the one I found here last year. If the current lede proves to be stable, I hope to revisit my original plan to link this article to my own lexicon while scrapping the definition I created in my readers' behalf. Kent Dominic·(talk) 13:24, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Hey, I wasn't able to edit Talk:Race and intelligence until today, when I got autoconfirmed. So there's some precedent for it. Happy (Slap me) 16:27, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The terms male and female typically do not apply in sexually undifferentiated species in which the individuals are isomorphic (look the same) and the gametes are isogamous (indistinguishable in size and shape), such as the green alga Ulva lactuca. Some kinds of functional differences between gametes, such as in fungi, may be referred to as mating types.

— Current text

I suggest a revised version:

Some living things lack sexes. Certain species reproduce asexually. In others, such as the green alga ulva lactuca, where individuals are isomorphic (look the same) and the gametes are isogamous (similar in size and shape), the terms male and female are not used. Biologists sometimes describe them in terms of mating types.

— Proposed text

Your thoughts, please?—S Marshall T/C 17:49, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]