Industry Initiative Develops First Recommendations for Inclusive Naming
The Initiative on inclusive naming (ini) is promoting the replacement of harmful and excluding formulations in information technology, and has recently developed its first lists of recommendations. Offering three categories of “undesirable” terms that the industry should abandon, the version 1.0 list of inclusive naming is available on the ini website.
Level 1 contains words and phrases that should be immediately replaced, including “abort” which should be replaced with “interrupt,” and “master/slave” which should be replaced with “owner/slave” or “managed.” Gray areas like “blackhat/whitehat” and “whitelist” should also be retired. Ini recommends against using the word “tribe” to describe groups of people, due to its association with colonialism.
Several companies have already abandoned these terms due to their racial connotation or links to slavery.
Level 2 suggests words and phrases that it is strongly recommended to replace, such as “sanity check” which should be replaced with “confidence check” or “coherence check,” as the term is “humiliating for neuro-based people.”
Lastly, level 3 suggests terms that should be replaced. For instance, “man-in-the-world” should be replaced with “man in the middle” as the former is too gendered, and “segregate” should be replaced with “divided” as it has extremely racist connotations.
Ini also determined some terms that were discussed but were not recommended for the ban, which are the Level 0 words. These include terms like “parent/child” and “red team,” which do not describe offensive relationships.
Despite being completed several weeks ago, ini has yet to officially launch the list of v.1.0, with a request to sign the announcement project still outstanding. Ini leaders, including organizations such as IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Red Hat, Cisco, Extreme Networks, Cloud National Computing Foundation and Gitlab, have shown support for the initiative.
Ini’s mission is in response to how harmful words can be, and how their use in documents or conversations could alienate and demean individuals, potentially damaging their self-esteem or reputation and creating obstacles for their success.