We're running into a bug when contributors have "nil" for their gender or their nationality. We think it would be best to use "unknown" (or some other similar string) for genders and nationalities that aren't known rather than "nil".
I think it also represents the state of the data more accurately to researchers -- if you do counts of "Scottish verse contributors" and get 150 of them, then "female Scottish verse contributors" for 20 and "male Scottish verse contributors" for 50 there's the "why do they only add up to 70 when there are 150 in the database?" If we set "unknown" as a gender type, then it becomes obvious you'd need to query "unknown gender Scottish verse contributors" for the additional 80. (And, hopefully, people will feed the additional data needed to update those fields back to you!)
We're running into a bug when contributors have "nil" for their gender or their nationality. We think it would be best to use "unknown" (or some other similar string) for genders and nationalities that aren't known rather than "nil".
I think it also represents the state of the data more accurately to researchers -- if you do counts of "Scottish verse contributors" and get 150 of them, then "female Scottish verse contributors" for 20 and "male Scottish verse contributors" for 50 there's the "why do they only add up to 70 when there are 150 in the database?" If we set "unknown" as a gender type, then it becomes obvious you'd need to query "unknown gender Scottish verse contributors" for the additional 80. (And, hopefully, people will feed the additional data needed to update those fields back to you!)
What do you think?