Over a number of years I’ve made various changes to WordPress to make it a little less exclusive with the language it’s used. Most of the time it’s been in the code comments but, sometimes, that also includes things that most people are more likely to see – the best example was the change in the Settings screen from a “black list” to a “block list”.

And, after some time away from it, I’ve returned and submitted more language changes once more.

Not that they’ve always gone down well with everyone.

This is ridiculous. This ultra political correctness and radical leftist crap have got to stop. There are a lot more important TECHNOLOGY changes that core contributors should be focusing on 

The fight is between those who believe that open speech is essential to preserving the nation and those who believe in narrowing the debate and favor cultural erasure.

Please, please, stop with this nonsense. 

We fight racism ! We change words ! This is beyond ridiculous.

Unfortunately, we are seeing how politics is overtaking reasonable sense. The open source community was built by many great people. And, unfortunately, it will be destroyed by a small bunch of politically-blind people 

My search for changes to make, in the past, has even lead to me finding other issues (such as when I discovered then when deleting a sub-site from a multisite, it suddenly change referring to “deleting” it to “disabling” it, both of which are quite different things – needless to say, that was then changed to be consistent).

The latest term to find my ire? “Sanity check”. It’s used 22 times in code comments, across 16 files. What’s the issue? Well, a rather excellent Gist explains it…

The phrase sanity check is ableist, and unnecessarily references mental health in our code bases. It denotes that people with mental illnesses are inferior, wrong, or incorrect, and the phrase sanity continues to be used by employers and other individuals to discriminate against these people.

So, I’ve modified all references to “Confidence check”. It means the same but without any ableist baggage. I submitted it earlier today and already it’s been accepted and added to the 6.5 release. Indeed, the always excellent Tonya even found some other uses of “sanity” that I missed (e.g. “for sanity”) and has added those to the list as well.

Whatever some people may think, I’ll continue to use my time to make the world a better place for everyone else around me, whether they necessarily appreciate it or not. I have a big list of words and phrases that I want to look out for – my work is not finished!

(Written as part of Matt Mullenweg’s push to blog more!)