Consider speciesist language in documentation and style guide

[samtuckerdavis]

Summary

Astro's documentation and contributing guides already do a great job promoting inclusive, welcoming language — the Code of Conduct calls for "welcoming and inclusive language," and the Writing and Style Guide links to Google's inclusive documentation guide.

This issue proposes extending that inclusivity to consider speciesist language — idioms and metaphors rooted in the exploitation or harm of animals, which are increasingly recognized as a form of exclusionary language.

What is speciesist language?

Speciesist language includes common phrases that normalize violence toward or exploitation of animals:

Speciesist phrase	Suggested alternative
"kill two birds with one stone"	"solve two problems at once"
"guinea pig" (as test subject)	"test subject", "beta tester"
"dogfooding"	"self-hosting", "self-testing", "internal testing"
"canary release/deploy"	"early release", "preview release"
"monkey-patch"	"runtime patch", "hot patch"
"cattle vs pets" (infrastructure)	"ephemeral vs persistent", "disposable vs maintained"
"master/slave"	"primary/replica", "leader/follower"

These terms are so embedded in tech culture that they're often invisible. But for people who take animal rights seriously — and there are many of us in tech — encountering this language in documentation creates the same kind of exclusionary feeling that other forms of non-inclusive language do.

Current findings

I searched both withastro/astro and withastro/docs for common speciesist terms:

• "Guinea Pig" appears in test fixture data in the main withastro/astro repo (in content.config.ts files across 4 test fixtures as a sample data entry for a "rodents" collection). This is a literal animal reference in sample data (not an idiom), so it's less concerning, but worth noting.
• No instances of "kill two birds," "dogfooding," "monkey patch," "master/slave," or "cattle" were found in documentation content — which is great and shows the codebase is already fairly clean.

Proposal

Since the documentation is already largely free of these terms, the main opportunity is proactive guidance to keep it that way as the docs grow:

1. Add a brief section to the Writing and Style Guide about avoiding speciesist language, similar to how the guide already links to Google's inclusive documentation resource. This would help contributors be mindful of this when writing new content.

2. Reference this in the style guide's existing "inclusive documentation" link, perhaps expanding it from a single link to a short list of inclusive language considerations.

A suggested addition to the writing style guide could be as simple as:

Use inclusive language, including avoiding speciesist terms.

Tech documentation often includes idioms rooted in animal harm (e.g., "kill two birds with one stone," "guinea pig" as a test subject). Prefer neutral alternatives (e.g., "solve two problems at once," "test subject"). See also: write inclusive documentation.

Context

This aligns with Astro's existing values around inclusivity. The Google inclusive documentation guide that the style guide already references covers some of this territory, but doesn't go into detail on speciesist language specifically. Making it explicit in Astro's own guide would be a meaningful signal.

For reference, there's growing awareness of this issue in tech — projects like Inclusive Naming Initiative have addressed master/slave and similar terms, and the conversation is expanding to cover animal-derived idioms as well.

Happy to submit a PR to the contribute.docs.astro.build repo adding this guidance if there's interest.

[sarah11918]

Converting to a Discussion, as per our process of using Issues as an inbox for already discussed and agreed-upon items to fix!

[samtuckerdavis]

Thanks for moving this to a discussion, Sarah. Happy to continue the conversation here if there's any interest from the community.