Reading through the thread in its entirety (and also have seen different sites with
similar requests), I tend to agree with Dale, Richard and Silvia here. Similar to
Richard, I am more someone who rather reads than writes, and I can clearly see that I may
be burned for voicing my opinion here. However, I feel that this seems to be necessary to
put things into perspective.
First of all, I agree that people and everything around them (including applied language)
are constantly changing. New words are adopted and being used replacing others, which in
turn run out of fashion. And that is the way life goes.
However, seeing the attempted (and applied) changes for the languages in the recent decade
or two, it has mainly been a comedy show for me where some few people try to forcefully
tie certain words meant for technical or otherwise specific topics into political views of
inclusion for people, derailing the entire conversation and the meaning of what was tried
to be said. Be it LGBT or the typical (and chiefly) American-viewed racism against their
African-originated population. The latter being way less dominant if not (almost)
entirely absent elsewhere on the planet. Living in Sweden, I have African and Chinese
colleagues here as well and speaking to them about all topics so far, I have never seen
anyone starting to voice concerns about certain technical terms taken as offensive.
Likewise, I have never heard anyone complain about others using specific words. Everyone
just takes the words for what they were intended for: the topic which was discussed.
Seeing this alarming trend of trying to put these less meaningful, but severely impacting
changes of language into place, let us fast forward 20-50 years into the future. I can
clearly see that we are in danger of running out of words we can use without offending
someone somewhere on this planet.
People need to learn and understand that some words have several meanings and their
single-mindedness to put them into a political context is not helping anyone (not even
themselves). For me this is more in the direction of trolling/disruptive
behavior/destructive criticism rather than it being constructive.
The purpose is for the Editorial
Board to be more proactive in promoting inclusive non-biased
conversations within the Fedora Community, by keeping articles non-
biased.
I fail to see how "blacklist/whitelist" was biased until someone brought this
entire conversation up in the first place. Only then, and only when putting in quite some
effort to bend my point of view purposefully enough, I can see that they may under certain
circumstances be seen as what this thread is all about. However, snapping out of it and
trying me to get back into it, I would need to use the same extensive effort to make me
think again along these lines.
Second I want to point out the English language is an ever evolving
language. Eventually, the use of allow/deny lists will likely be the
norm, but not because Fedora Magazine Editorial Board members decided
to make a guide, but because people will adopt them through daily use,
much like "blacklist/whitelist" are the norm today.
Adoption (or change), as I pointed out in my second paragraph above, is a normal course of
change of an applied language and will occur over time when more and more people casually
use the new word in favor of the old. This thread, much like other similar threads on
different sites, however, is not about adoption, but points out that "it was
wrong" to use certain words and that they should be changed, ideally immediately, if
not retroactively, and hence, has nothing to do with adoption.