947823 - Replace gender-specific pronouns with gender-neutral pronouns

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement)

Description

[Charlie Somerville]

Attachment: bugzilla-pronouns.diff

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.63 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Downloaded BugZilla source, opened show_bug.cgi.


Actual results:

Noticed the use of 'he' to refer to the user, noticed other examples of gender specific pronouns in internal and external documentation throughout the codebase.


Expected results:

Internal and external documentation should only use gender-neutral pronouns.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Comment on attachment 8344505 [details] [diff] [review]
bugzilla-pronouns.diff

Hi Charlie,

I'm interested: did you make this patch manually, or do you have a script of some sort? If a script, how does it know what pronoun is appropriate in what instance?

If we are going to make this change, consistency is valuable. Did you attempt to change every instance, or just a selection?

I have no objection to using gender-neutral language where no meaning is lost; however, we are currently attempting to rejig our docs into a new format in bug 912064 (the wheels of review are grinding slowly...), so now is not a great moment for anyone to be patching them. 

The same issue doesn't apply to the code, so if you were to make a patch for only code files (that's everything outside the docs directory) that would not get held up for that reason.

Gerv

Comment 2

[Charlie Somerville]

Gerv: I'll admit I created this patch by hand. I attempted to change every instance of he, him, his, she, and her I could find.

I'm happy to revise the patch to only change code if you're not in a position to take documentation patches at the moment. It would be great to see the documentation eventually changed to use gender-neutral pronouns though.

Comment 3

[Charlie Somerville]

Attachment: bugzilla-pronouns-v2.diff

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Comment on attachment 8345691 [details] [diff] [review]
bugzilla-pronouns-v2.diff

r=gerv.

Gerv

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I've started a discussion on the Bugzilla developers list (mozilla.dev.apps.bugzilla) about the policy implications of this patch.

Gerv

Comment 6

[miketosh]

Just an opinion, using singular "they" can in some instances be ambiguous as to if it is referring to the singular person or multiple people.  (I seem to recall getting corrected by a grade school grammar teacher for using "they" too, maybe that is the basis of my opinion. :-) )

Instead, I prefer myself to use "his or her" or "the person's".

For example, the following statement:
> Logs out the specified user (invalidating all their sessions), taking a

could also be written:
> Logs out the specified user (invalidating all the user's sessions), taking a

or:
> Logs out the specified user (invalidating all the person's sessions), taking a

Or even:
> Logs out the specified user (invalidating all his or her sessions), taking a


As a preference, I like to recognize that the masculine pronouns have been used for centuries to refer to all people, regardless of gender.  Unfortunately though, when used in legal documents, exclusionist types have used the ambiguity to exclude the other gender.  Good thing Bugzilla Docs don't represent any legal guidelines or rules.

Comment 7

[Simon Green]

(In reply to Gervase Markham [:gerv] from comment #5)
> I've started a discussion on the Bugzilla developers list
> (mozilla.dev.apps.bugzilla) about the policy implications of this patch.

I haven't seen any objection on the mailing list about this. Time to commit it?

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Sorry; busy over the holidays. Will address this bug tomorrow.

Gerv

Comment 9

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I believe we need commit approval. (If not, someone point me at the current tree rules.)

Gerv

Comment 10

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Go for it.  Technically "he" and "his" are gender neutral, but since there is no specific masculine pronoun to complement it in English and there IS a feminine one, it gets treated as if it were masculine most places these days.

It doesn't help that everyone teaches their kids "girls are her, boys are him" when they're little, so it gets cemented in really early.

In the interest of gender-neutralness probably best to avoid the ambiguity. :)

Comment 11

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Comment on attachment 8345691 [details] [diff] [review]
bugzilla-pronouns-v2.diff

Actually, this patch is stale and no longer commits cleanly.  The fixes should be obvious (some of the surrounding html got modified since this was posted), so approval stands, commit as soon as it's cleaned up.

Comment 12

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Charlie: could you do a patch refresh?

Thanks,

Gerv

Comment 13

[Frédéric Buclin]

Committing to: bzr+ssh://[e-mail]/bugzilla/trunk/
modified Bugzilla.pm
modified buglist.cgi
modified describecomponents.cgi
modified editflagtypes.cgi
modified importxml.pl
modified request.cgi
modified show_bug.cgi
modified token.cgi
modified userprefs.cgi
modified Bugzilla/Attachment.pm
modified Bugzilla/Auth.pm
modified Bugzilla/Bug.pm
modified Bugzilla/Constants.pm
modified Bugzilla/Flag.pm
modified Bugzilla/Hook.pm
modified Bugzilla/Migrate.pm
modified Bugzilla/Product.pm
modified Bugzilla/Search.pm
modified Bugzilla/Token.pm
modified Bugzilla/User.pm
modified Bugzilla/Util.pm
modified Bugzilla/Auth/Verify/LDAP.pm
modified Bugzilla/Install/DB.pm
modified Bugzilla/Search/Quicksearch.pm
modified Bugzilla/WebService/Bug.pm
modified Bugzilla/WebService/User.pm
modified extensions/Example/Extension.pm
modified template/en/default/welcome-admin.html.tmpl
modified template/en/default/admin/confirm-action.html.tmpl
modified template/en/default/admin/params/auth.html.tmpl
modified template/en/default/admin/params/query.html.tmpl
modified template/en/default/bug/process/confirm-duplicate.html.tmpl
modified template/en/default/pages/quicksearch.html.tmpl
modified template/en/default/pages/release-notes.html.tmpl
modified template/en/default/pages/release-notes3.html.tmpl
Committed revision 8936.