I have started to move away Bodhi from using the term “karma” to rate updates. I know this word has become familiar to all Fedora users, but there were several requests in the past to stop the misuse. As I may not be the most “politically correct” person you know, this task has been low priority for me; nevertheless, I’ve now found some spare time to start working on it.
So, I plan to replace the term “karma” with “feedback” where users submit their (+1|0|-1) vote: a Comment will no more have the “karma” property, but it will be “feedback”. At the same time, TestCaseKarma and BugKarma will become TestCaseFeedback and BugFeedback.
For updates, the term “karma” is used as the sum of all karma|feedback submitted by users, so I plan to rename this to “rating”. English is not my native language, but I think it is correct to rate an update positive|neutral|negative and rating should be quite understandable to foreign speakers.
I’m writing the changes so that a compatibility layer should not break other tools, which means for a decent amount of time anything still using the term “karma” should continue to work. I can push the changes into Bodhi’s staging instance for anyone willing to test them against their code (I’ll let you know when there’s something ready to test).
So, the discussion mostly took place on the devel mailing list and left me with mixed feelings in proceeding in the effort.
I’d like to get an easy sum of all opinions there by asking folks to vote in the following poll.
As for the name replacing karma I’m now thinking about a more neutral quality: a “quality vote” attached to comments and a “quality score” as an update property to express if the update qualifies for being pushed in the repository.
What is your feeling about renaming the term “karma” in Bodhi?
I strongly agree
I don’t have a strong preference, but I’d rather agree that a new naming might be better understandable
I don’t have a strong preference, but I’d rather maintain the term karma
Usually I don’t understand the strenuous resistance versus the changes in the used terminology. I read some messages in the mailing list.
If we are used to a word, but one day such word comes out that it might offend an entire group of people, or it could be inappropriate, or whatever, well, the world changes, I don’t see any reason to not change terminology if it is for the good.
We have done it with whitelist/blacklist, master/slave, master->rawhide. Whatever. If someone is pushing for change, I don’t understand why oppose it in an irrational way.
I also agree that sometimes we go too far in political correctness. Yeh, probably every word in the universe could be offensive or disturbing or equivocal for someone, but if it comes out that some terminology can be improved for the good, why not?
Fedora Rawhide has the same name. Doesnt matter my point is that that name is also very strange. Maybe not to a point where it insults people, unlike Karma I would expect.
If someone is pushing for change, I don’t understand why oppose it in an irrational way.
I suspect part of the problem is that there’s been very little push for the change. There’s a nearly 3 year old bug and the only person in favour of change on the mailing list is the bug reporter. Meanwhile, someone has to make the change happen, working on this instead of something that could be more important and none of the replacement terms seem an improvement over ‘karma’.
Change is not a problem. Change for the sake of change is.
I want to see those requests, dates, and ideally if those requester still feel their position strongly enough to see the change right now.
This is basically deja-vu for me with a video game change and somehow it was done for users who requested it, without there being any notable amount of people visibly asking for it. It was purely political, while skirting on weak reasons.
On the one hand, I thought karma was an odd choice of word. On Phoronix forums I think someone mentioned “kudos” and I think that’s a cool alternative.
On the other hand, I don’t care about the term to the degree worth changing it. I feel there was some decision to decide on that term to begin with, and changing it after that decision I feel should be weighed against that previous reason.
If it was just chosen dart-board style from someone in a basement doing some backend, fair enough; it implies the name wasn’t chosen based on a stance or feeling, and probably doesn’t hold much weight in meaning. Changing it to something more meaningful today isn’t too unreasonable.
If it was chosen to virtue signal something or have some kind of meaning, that’s where the weighing comes in. Why are “others” today wanting to change a term that was chosen for a reason?
If the term is being changed to not offend “others”, then that’s (imo) not reasonable because the term was chosen for non-offensive and probably wildly non-relevant reasons before, ironically probably at a higher moral-ground than the reasons proposed to change it today.
Overall, I don’t want to see the term “karma” changed without good tangible reason.