Ah OK, I think we’re getting to the heart of why you are saying that this wasn’t an issue.
When you say that the author wasn’t assuming anything, what exactly do you mean? If, for example, I write in a guide that if a user of my software does ‘a’ then he can expect result ‘b’, do you disagree that I am assuming my users go by he/him pronouns?
I might not have done it with intention, but there is an assumption being made there. Words mean things.
Just because you wrote your documentation a certain way, doesn’t automatically mean that you feel a certain way about any particular group, or that your users are primarily a certain gender. It may just be writing what pronoun you are most familiar with.
In this particular case, we can see that the author didn’t exactly make the best case for himself.
However, there was never a problem to begin with until the person that requested the change also accused the the author of assuming that the user/dev of the OS is male.
If that little bit of accusation would have been left out, and they just put a note like “grammatical correction” it may have just been accepted and moved on. Instead they asked for a change while accusing the author of feeling a certain way.
So, not ‘exactly this’. I wrote that in my example an assumption had been made, whether I intended it or not.
Same as in the documentation this post is about, therefore the problem existed before it was pointed out.
The grammatical error to be fixed was the assumption in the language used. Both of these things are true. Pointing it out very simply, as part of providing the reason for the change, is completely normal
Ah OK, I think we’re getting to the heart of why you are saying that this wasn’t an issue.
When you say that the author wasn’t assuming anything, what exactly do you mean? If, for example, I write in a guide that if a user of my software does ‘a’ then he can expect result ‘b’, do you disagree that I am assuming my users go by he/him pronouns?
I might not have done it with intention, but there is an assumption being made there. Words mean things.
Exactly this.
Just because you wrote your documentation a certain way, doesn’t automatically mean that you feel a certain way about any particular group, or that your users are primarily a certain gender. It may just be writing what pronoun you are most familiar with.
In this particular case, we can see that the author didn’t exactly make the best case for himself.
However, there was never a problem to begin with until the person that requested the change also accused the the author of assuming that the user/dev of the OS is male.
If that little bit of accusation would have been left out, and they just put a note like “grammatical correction” it may have just been accepted and moved on. Instead they asked for a change while accusing the author of feeling a certain way.
So, not ‘exactly this’. I wrote that in my example an assumption had been made, whether I intended it or not.
Same as in the documentation this post is about, therefore the problem existed before it was pointed out.
The grammatical error to be fixed was the assumption in the language used. Both of these things are true. Pointing it out very simply, as part of providing the reason for the change, is completely normal