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Re: sexist language in debian instructions/documentation



On Monday 02 August 2004 12:28 pm, Helen Faulkner wrote:
> 
> Hello everyone,
> 
> So I've spent most of today battling my way through the New Maintainers 
> Guide, trying to work out how to package some very simple things.  I 
> *think* I'm making headway...
> 
> I've been reading various pieces of documentation/policy/guidelines in 
> my travels, and I keep finding things like this, from 
> http://www.debian.org/devel/join/nm-advocate:
> 
> "There is a checklist of what a NM has to do. Basically, he needs a GPG 
> key signed by a developer, he has to answer some Philosophy and 
> Procedures questions and in the Tasks and Skills test he has to show 
> that he has the experience to be a good Debian developer.

With a bit of thought, there is usually a way to reword stuff like this to 
make it gender-neutral:

 "There is a checklist of what a NM has to do. The NM needs a GPG 
 key signed by a developer, then has to answer some Philosophy and 
Procedures questions. The Tasks and Skills test proves that the NM has the 
experience to be a good Debian developer."

For the parts where it's too awkward to avoid using pronouns, it's a little 
more difficult. And getting sucked into a world of alternating paragraphs, or 
carefully counting each incidence of each pronoun, is a seriously awful thing 
to contemplate. I vote for a "him or her" or "him/her" type of construct. 
That's not too annoying if it's not used very much, which it shouldn't be, as 
my example shows

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