Allowlist, Not Whitelist. Blocklist, Not Blacklist. Microsoft Lops Off Offensive Words
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Microsoft's adoption of the Google-developed Chromium browser engine for Edge has resulted in a proposal to cleanse the open-source code of "potentially offensive terms."
Issue 981129 in the Chromium bug log lists a suggestion by Microsoft to "cleanup of potentially offensive terms in codebase" aims to rid the software blueprints of language such as whitelist (change to allowlist), blacklist (change to blocklist), "offensive terms using 'wtf' as protocol messages," and other infelicities.
This bug report was raised by a Microsoft contributor, who stated: "We are just sharing a subset of what PoliCheck scanned for us," Policheck being "a machine-learned model that another team manages that does context based scanning on hundreds of file formats."
Googler Rick Byers, a Chromium engineer, gave the issue a cautious welcome, saying: "This sounds like a good strategy to me, thanks for doing this! We certainly have never intended for anything in the codebase to be potentially offensive, but I'm also not aware of anyone making an effort to find them all." He added:
I don't expect Chrome teams to necessarily make these bugs a priority (we haven't seen this pose a problem for us in practice as far as I know), but if cleaning this up is valuable for Microsoft (or any another Chromium contributor) then we should have no trouble getting the necessary code reviews (at least in the platform code). And yeah there are folks who look for GoodFirstBug and may want to pick up some easy commits.
Although changing comments or variable names in the source code is generally invisible to the user, this kind of revision can be problematic if it wrecks things like names in preferences and policies.
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