What's in a name (word alternatives for inclusiveness, and ethical speech)

Alignment Best practices
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Hi, I wanted to make a word list of ethical alternatives that I often try to adopt in my personal usage like my suggestion to Arnold for Awesome humane tech collection list, with respect to using “BlockList/AllowList” instead of Blacklist/Whitelist. He wondered if such a list existed somewhere. We can start one and curate more from other sources and have it on a repo.

I’m starting with the below 5 :

  1. BlockList/AllowList instead of Blacklist/Whitelist (think etymology of these unethical words)
  2. Avoiding usage of “guys” as gender neutral 2nd person plural when women/girls are there. (We can see why it’s not cool if we address a group of 2 men and 6 women as “gals” and observe the reaction)
  3. Using human(s) / person(s) instead of man/men. Particularly with adjectives “Great person” instead of “Great man” even if we speak about a human male. (so that we get the idea it’s about greatness we are talking about, not gender)
  4. Using ’ she’ as many or more times as he as pronoun in documentations or essays or articles and emails for pronoun to ‘one’ - user/one has the choice to do [this] if she wishes to do [that,]
  5. Avoid master/slave terminology like Arnold mentioned in Mastodon. I think we can use Host/Guest instead, or any such word closely linked word pair if you can suggest to us here with your own list.

Gokul.

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:grinning: A big yes to this!

  • Receiving money instead of making money
  • Speaking with instead of speaking to
  • Rich countries instead of developed countries
  • Never assuming anyone is male or female (even when it is sure)
  • Speaking about the entire global population, rather than just people born in rich countries or people from your own country
  • Expatriate instead of migrant, and vice-versa
  • People instead of traffic (as used in analytics)
  • People instead of users
  • People instead of clicks, leads and so on
  • Spyware instead of Google, Facebook, etc. software / web sites
  • Marketeer instead of marketer
  • Scammer instead of hustler
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Nice and sorely needed to track, use and promote. @gkrishnaks, could you also address the issue with Matomo project renaming on a different topic and make cross-reference? Thank you :blush:

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Hi @aschrijver I have created a common thread to discuss this topic on reaching to ethical humane application creators if they have accidentally unintentionally used a non-inclusive word . Approaching HT list apps for any inclusive wording recommendation

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Just now, while typing a reply to this PR to Awesome Humane tech list, I got this idea in my mind to say “Dotted points” instead of “bullet points” !

I will create a repository soon tabulated with the recommended alternatives which we can keep updating for reference.