General: Remove “whitelist” and “blacklist” in favor of more clear and inclusive language.
“The WordPress open source community cares about diversity. We strive to maintain a welcoming environment where everyone can feel included.”
With this commit, all occurrences of “whitelist” and “blacklist” (with the single exception of the $new_whitelist_options
global variable) are removed. A new ticket has been opened to explore renaming the $new_whitelist_options
variable (#50434).
Changing to more specific names or rewording sentences containing these terms not only makes the code more inclusive, but also helps provide clarity. These terms are often ambiguous. What is being blocked or allowed is not always immediately clear. This can make it more difficult for non-native English speakers to read through the codebase.
Words matter. If one contributor feels more welcome because these terms are removed, this was worth the effort.
Props strangerstudios, jorbin, desrosj, joemcgill, timothyblynjacobs, ocean90, ayeshrajans, davidbaumwald, earnjam.
See #48900, #50434.
Fixes #50413.