WeRelate:Suggestions/Search form to include gender

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Adding a new family member, one is presented with a search form. This helps to find out if the family member already is on WeRelate. Yet, if the search criteria suggest that a female person is about to be added, the search results include male persons. I wonder if it is possible to include gender in the search? best regards, Ron

One workaround that seems to help is to place <gender>F or <gender>M in the keywords field (present on the search form, and accessible on the second screen of the add-person search). I tried this with Deliverance, a name used for both genders and it seems to work.
The other question, perhaps the difficult one, would be how to weight this field. I.e., say there is a person with the right birthdate but wrong gender. How do you order that compared to a person with the wrong birthdate and correct gender? --Jrich 20:36, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
Since the gender field is required, it should have large weight. The chance that the gender is wrong, imho, is much smaller than her birthdate (which could, for example, be the date of baptism)
My 2 cents, Ron
Not arguing that it shouldn't be added, though I personally might not consider it a very useful change. Names seems to be fairly gender-specific, mostly, so searching for Mary and female seems somewhat redundant to me. Also, I find it handy just to find a sibling exists, since this alerts me that the family page already exists, which might not happen if the other gender was screened out. --Jrich 00:00, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
So you mean to say you are searching for something else than is searched for by the search form?
No, meaning that people enter data funny, sloppy, etc. especially in colonial times. Meaning I don't trust searches all that much. So if the search results for a Mary come back and include her brother John, I will usually open John in a new tab, click on his parents, who should also be Mary's parents, and make sure Mary wasn't entered as Molly, Polly, Marah, or with her sister's birthdate, or with no birth date, or any of the things that one runs across on occasion. --Jrich 00:46, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
Ah that makes sense. Thank you !
Well, what remains is the request to have the search field "Gender" added to the search form and prefilled where possible.
Jrich thanks much for your thoughts. It makes much sense now to have this field added and default to neutral. Thanks, Ron. woepwoep 04:34, 29 September 2020 (UTC)