Re: [Terminology] Guidance for NIST Staff on Using Inclusive Language in Documentary Standards (NISTIR 8366)

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Hi again,

TL&DR;

Have faith: trust people to do the right thing, given the guidance, and they will almost always do so.  Doing otherwise requires burying ourselves in process.

> On 2 May 2021, at 04:24, [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> But I haven't seen any discussion of failure paths.  Being extra cautious given the specific issue involved, which has developed over a lllooonnnggg period of complaints, it might be worth explicitly discussing who would be responsible for handling any complaints.  If IETF were to receive any, would they just shuttle them over to NIST?  To who at NIST?  By what process of "shuttling"?  And so on.  Would there end up being significant delay involved?  So alternatively, maybe a TERM WG should exist just to maintain an RFC which would include the two references (to NIST and to CMOS), and end with a "<...> is the responsible contact for the RFC".  If it turns out there are no complaints or questions, then it isn't taking much time from anyone.  If however it would take a lot of time, maybe better to have a separate TERM RFC and save time for the ITEF RFC Editor.


The TERM working group draft charter had them putting out non-normative advice, so this is really no different.  And non-normative advice should be sufficient.  Consider this: every document that the IETF produces requires rough consensus, and I cannot see how that consensus would be found for a document that is using some of the more egregious terms, never mind the less settled ones (the term “crazy”, for instance,  appears in only 11 of our RFCs and only three in the last fifteen years, one of which is part of an author email address).

So even if the authors miss the term, there are plenty of opportunities to make a correction, or not if the situation warrants some sort of retention, such as a reference to another standard that has old terminology.

By the way, delay accrues to the community’s favor in this context: author motivations are generally to get a document finished, not to argue over terminology.  By way of example, one of my more recent works used the term “MUD controller”, which one person found confusing, and so the term was changed to “MUD manager”.  Looking back, I wish we would have chosen “MUD slinger”, but at the time it was not worth having a debate over what was proposed during review (QED).

Eliot