Inclusivity is central to Android’s culture, and our values include treating each other with dignity. As such, it’s important that everyone can contribute without facing the harmful effects of bias and discrimination. However, terms in our codebase, user interfaces, and documentation can perpetuate that discrimination. This policy gives guidance to address disrespectful terminology in code, interfaces, and documentation.
See Code of conduct for more information about Android standards.
Policy
Terminology that is derogatory, hurtful, or perpetuates discrimination, either directly or indirectly, should be avoided. This agrees with Google’s guidance on writing inclusive documentation.
The scope for this policy
The scope of this policy includes anything that a contributor would read while working on Android, including but not limited to:
- Names of variables, types, functions, files, build rules, binaries, exported variables
- Test data
- System output and displays
- Comments and documentation (both inside and outside of source files)
- Commit messages
Principles
- Be respectful: Derogatory language shouldn’t be necessary to describe how things work.
- Use culturally appropriate language: Some words might have significant historical or political meanings. Please consider this and use alternatives.
Determine if a particular terminology is OK or not
Apply the principles above. If you have any questions, you can reach out to android-community@googlegroups.com.
Examples of terminology to avoid
This list is NOT meant to be comprehensive. It contains a few examples that people have run into frequently.
Note that it's always worth considering whether a comment adds any value.
Sometimes the best fix is to remove the comment entirely. For example, a
comment saying only "Sanity check the header" immediately before a
function called verify_header doesn't add any value even if you're writing the
doc comment for public API. Be more specific about what is being checked, for
example "Check header for out of range values".
| Term | Suggested alternatives |
|---|---|
| master/slave | See alternatives for master and slave. |
| redline | priority line, track changes, design specs, UI annotations, exception, anomaly, special case, replacement list |
| whitelist/blacklist | See alternatives for blacklist. |
| (dark|light) graylist | For APIs:
|
| crazy, insane, cripple | See Avoid ableist language for guidelines. |
| sanity check | The word "check" alone often conveys the same meaning. Otherwise consider validate, verify, quick check, initial check, confidence check, soundness check, calibration check, readiness check. |
| dummy | unused, placeholder, no-op, base, fake/mock/stub. |
| grandfathered | See alternatives for grandfathered for guidelines. |
| gendered pronouns (for example, he or she) | they, them, their |
| man-in-the-middle (MITM) | on-path attacker |
| (black|white|gray) hat | ethical/unethical |
| first-class citizen | core feature, built-in, top-level |
When changing the language changes the meaning
In some circumstances, changing the language in the specification might interfere with the ability to understand the implementation, particularly when implementing code specifications. For these circumstances, we suggest one of the following, in order of decreasing preference:
- If using alternate terminology doesn't interfere with understanding, use alternate terminology.
- Don't propagate the terminology beyond the layer of code that is performing the interfacing. Where necessary, use alternative terminology at the API boundaries.
- If you can't fix the language yourself, file a bug with the respective team.