> When making a pull request, be clear about what you’re changing and why. Please include the following: “This comment has been identified as either hateful, hurtful or discriminatory as part of a project to #CleanUpGitHub. This pull request was made by a human. For more info, please check EthicalCode’s website at www.ethicalco.de/cleanupgh”.<p>Hard to say for sure without more insight into the types of pull requests you're looking to make, but I worry that starting with "hateful" might immediately put people in defensive mode.<p>Perhaps it could be rephrased?<p>E.g. "We're working hard to promote a more inclusive dev community and as part of that goal, we noticed this comment and would like to suggest an alternative..."
I personally don't like this idea. Different people will have drastically different standards. What is wrong or right for a project, to me, depends on the standards of the developers and users. In this case, the jury is neither.<p>In some communities, otherwise offensive phrases have been desensitizes or misappropriated. Those communities might have projects which are only used by them, but are public on github.<p>Somewhat similarly, most of the repos on github are single-contributor "private" projects that just happen to be public. I see nothing wrong with them expressing whatever they want in their code and comments... but I do think it's out of line for a third party to come out of the blue and cast a ruling on it.<p>I can see the argument that "Oh, it's just a pull request, they don't have to accept it", but I still don't like this project as a whole.<p>I don't think the repos with offensive words or hate speech are driving people off of open source or github or coding, only off of those specific projects - as they deserve.
What is the likely outcome of this? I'm guessing a lot of pull requests that never get merged. This is essentially the application of one very subjective morality over lexical sentiment and embodies the wider issue of offence.<p>Offence ultimately derives from intent and we, as the end user, don't have intent inferred to us while reading code. It may be misguided for a developer to use "faggot" or "bitch" as a placeholder variable, but these make no implication of the developers sentiment or any wider statement about such respective issues.<p>In reality, the better solution is don't use software you disagree with. If there is no better alternative, fork it and create a version you do agree with. That is the joy of open source.
It would be nice if they gave links to actual examples of the "hate speech" they're attempting to police.<p>I honestly don't remember ever seeing any, and I use github quite a bit. That's not to say that it doesn't exist (I'm sure it does, given the sheer size of github), but it seems dubious to me that the problem is widespread enough to warrant a project of this nature.