Geek.Zone Joins The Inclusive Naming Initiative

It’s our most important value – We believe that everyone is welcome at Geek.Zone. To further support this, Geek.Zone has joined The Inclusive Naming Initiative, because the words we use matter.

They say that

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me.

Old adage

The intention of this rhyme is that it will give children resilience against being called names. The truth is that

  • physical wounds heal, but mental wounds can last a lifetime
  • telling children to “be more resilient” is a form of victim-blaming; should we not tell everyone to just be excellent to each other?

As a first step, our Dev team have migrated away from using any words featured in the INI word lists. For example, our GitHub repos now all have a default branch called “main”. If you see any instances that we missed, please do log an issue in GitHub. We will also begin working on an automated code inclusivity checker so that only inclusive code can be contributed at Geek.Zone. This will, of course, be open source, so anyone will be able to use this for free.

As always, this is just a small step, not a conclusion. If you have any ideas on how to make your Geek.Zone better, join our Discord and discuss them with the community!

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