RE: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[John E Drake <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

This is the most sensible email on this thread.

Yours Irrespectively,

John


Juniper Business Use Only

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Nico Williams
> Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2020 11:55 AM
> To: John C Klensin <[e-mail]>
> Cc: [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language
> 
> [External Email. Be cautious of content]
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 12:59:36AM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
> > (2) Creation of a dictionary of bad words (even to the extent that the
> > I-D does it) is unlikely to be satisfactory, especially if, in
> > practice, it devolves into "anything not forbidden by the list is
> > allowed".  Encouraging some group of people to participate in the IETF
> > by playing enforcers of cultural norms (whether as "language police"
> > or otherwise) or in the form of a WG is unlikely to work out well for
> > either the IETF or the portions of the Internet that we are supposedly
> > trying to make better... and the people who depend on our work.
> 
> Yes.  The way to enforce reasonable language is to review for it as empathetic
> adults rather than with a list of verboten words, and to raise and discuss any
> issues with document authors.  This would be (is) much broader and effective
> than a list of verboten words.  And the group involved in enforcing this rule is the
> entire community (rather than a special group of "enforcers"), starting with
> editors/co-authors, WG/RG participants, shepherds, responsible ADs, the
> IETF/IRTF (e.g., during IETF LC), the I* leadership, the RPC, and the RFC-Editor.
> 
> BTW, regarding {color}lists, we generally refer to "local policy" in RFCs, not to
> specific implementation designs for local policy.  I've checked my cache of RFCs
> I frequently check and there are many many more hits for 'local policy' than
> '(white|black)(-| |)?list', and many more hits for 'master' than 'slave' (only NTP
> and DNS in my cache refer to 'slave').  There are also more instances of 'primary'
> than 'master', and 'replica' than 'slave'.  I can happily say that none of my RFCs
> (unless I've somehow failed to cache some of them) use offensive language.  My
> cache is fairly small though.  A more complete analysis of Internet RFCs' use of
> problematic language would be useful.
> 
> Speaking of which, I don't see in draft-knodel-terminology anything like a survey
> or performed a survey of RFCs, current I-Ds, and maybe even expired I-Ds, of
> how many instances of offensive language appears in them, and even the
> frequency of offensive language as a function of publication/submission year.
> 
> It would seem that evidence in this matter is important.  Evidence of our having
> a problem would help drive faster adoption of better solutions.  Conversely, lack
> of evidence, or even evidence that we don't have a problem, would help us
> quickly dispose of solutions to non- problems.
> 
> > (3) We are an international community with aspirations to be
> > even more so.   That may imply that a term or acronym that is
> > neutral or otherwise acceptable in English may be offensive,
> > oppressive, or exclusionary when translated or transliterated into
> > another language.  We should probably be aware of that too.
> 
> There are limits to how sensitive we can be to issues we're not aware of.  I.e.,
> we depend on reviewers to tell us about the issues they are aware of.  Which
> brings us back to your point about banned word lists not possibly being
> sufficient.
> 
> Nico
> --