Re: WG Review: Effective Terminology in IETF Documents (term)

["Andrew G. Malis" <[e-mail]>]

S. and Lars,

I was at that plenary presentation. The obvious intention of Dave's quote
is that we reject "monarchs", but it is true that the word used at the time
(again, this was 1992) was "kings". But RFC 7292 also makes it clear that
this is a direct quote from Dave's presentation.

But that really has nothing to do with the proposed charter, which says
that the purpose of the WG is to "produce an Informational RFC containing
recommendations on the use of inclusive terminology in the technical work
produced by IETF participants". What's not in the charter of that WG is to
go back and review the language in every existing RFC.

Once the WG's work is done, and there's such an RFC, anyone is free to use
it to propose errata on existing RFCs and comments on other ancillary IETF
material, such as its web pages, the Tao, and so on. A new WG could even be
chartered at that time to do this sort of thing.

But I don't see how this has any effect on the proposed charter at hand.

Cheers,
Andy


On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 6:03 AM Lars Eggert <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 2021-4-1, at 12:47, S Moonesamy <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > There was an announcement for the WG review of TERM {1].  There was a
> saying of what was likely a general truth in 1992 which is documented in
> the Introduction Section of RFC 7282: "We reject: kings, presidents and
> voting."  The word "king" is defined in a dictionary (United States) [2] as
> "a male monarch of a major territorial unit".  Is it within the scope of
> the proposed working group to determine whether that word/saying is
> inclusive or exclusive?
>
> not in my reading, since the charter says the document the WG will produce
> should "express general principles for
> assessing when language is inclusive or exclusive".
>
> (I'll also note that the text from RFC7282 is in fact a quote from a
> plenary presentation from 1992.)
>
> > The draft charter mentions "informational recommendations". The
> terminology is ambiguous as it could be interpreted as meaning that the
> objective of the proposed working group product is to provide information
> or that the objective is to make recommendations.
>
> I don't see this ambiguity, but I'm happy to change "informational
> recommendations" to "recommendations", if that is clearer?
>
> > The draft charter mentions "industry initiatives".  Will the working
> group coordinate with industry initiatives from the United States and/or
> Europe only?
>
> The charter isn't constraining the WG in this regard.
>
> Thanks,
> Lars
>
>