Conduct a full-scale terminology review of Drupal (Fix Drupal terminology so that it is more accessible to users)

See comment in #2513400: Add text/video training/tour that introduces users to Drupal terminology about wikipedia simple english

I think that could inform this as well

My personal favorite example of something like this, that even a knowledgeable user would appreciate, is under Administration > Structure > Display modes. You have "form modes" and "view modes".

So right now, pick one:
Does "view modes" mean how content is shown? -or- Is "view modes" related to the Views module?

(and no, the help text is useless for answering this, it just says "Manage custom [form|view] modes")

We could do a lot of this in 8.x. Parts of it might end up 9.x-only but would end up being implementation issues.

This should probably also include and update terms explained in the glossary on d.o: https://www.drupal.org/glossary

How would we go about this?

Translation teams like German have terminology indexes for translation, see https://localize.drupal.org/node/1263 for example in German. Other teams have similar solutions in some cases even better/complete. I think those could be used to quickly collect key words.

So off the top of my head:

- get a list of all the content entity type labels
- get a list of all the config entity type labels
- get a list of all the Drupal alternatives for these that are already used or have been used in the past (i.e. node type vs. content type, text formats vs. input filters, 'post' vs. either node or comment per #431612: Stop using post as a noun)
- put them into some kind of priority for revisiting, not sure past that point.

The existing style guide on which words (not) to use in documentation could also be useful.

I will compile all the resources people come up with until the next Usability meeting next week, and so we can take it further from there.

@Gábor Hojtsy
In France we use this glossary with a handy browser extension that highlights terms from the glossary in l.d.o and show their translation in a tooltip.

WordPress is encouraging localizers to create a glossary and a styleguide for every language: https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/handbook/translating/glossary-style... As WordPress is such widely adopted it can be beneficial to have a look on how things are named there. Of course, as Drupal has much more technical terms, concepts like "bundles" or "view modes" are not present in the WordPress world, it is much harder to create a full Drupal terminology that makes sense for most users.

I also think that it can be handy to list terms that shouldn't be shown during content creation or typical editorial tasks (= to the editor target group). For example I think we should get rid of the term "node" completely in this context. This is mostly done in D8, but is there some sort of guide for things like this?

Drupal.org also has a glossary, but it's neither widely known or systematically maintained: https://www.drupal.org
/glossary

Two other resources:

• Content style guide also gives some explanations about why which words are to be used or not: https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/style-guide/content
• Glossary of the User Guide: https://userguide_new-drupal.dev.devdrupal.org/d8guide/en/glossary.html (login with drupal/drupal)

I had a look at these resources and there are too many terms too 'just' have a hand-written glossary that users, site builders and developers could consult.
Together the Drupal 8 User guide glossary and the glossary on d.o. have about 160 terms for Core and wider tech and Drupal community, and there are still terms missing that are introduced in D8 or used much more widely since then.
It also misses terms from widely used modules, which are part of the Drupal that users encounter on most sites.
(The quality of the explanations, or guidance on when what term should be used are also very varied. See for example entries for "entity=chunk of data".)

Consolidating the existing glossaries, and maybe adding more terms from a range of books about Drupal would be possible as a one-of, but it's hard to sustainably maintain. So we neither have a good basis for different type of users to reference, nor to use it as a basis for assessing and improving current terminology.

Maybe we need a technical structure first to keep track of terminology? Possibly as part of an overhaul of the help system?

One approach could be to include a "glossary file" into modules in which developers are asked to define the terms introduced in this module, and then displaying a glossary of all these terms as part of any website; similar to the help page that includes the help texts provided by all enabled modules.
This would give users a reference for the terms used on that specific site, but it could also provide more solid term definitions - and it would show us more easily where things are vague or where terms are used in different ways etc.

Maybe we can do a tryout for a specific part of Drupal? Thinking of #2701541: Rename Drupal Upgrade UI to Migrate Drupal UI here.

Here's a DX-side one... In the outside world, one speaks of data migration using an "extract, transform, load" model - extract data from the source, transform it into an appropriate form, and load it into the destination store. When I've contemplated naming things in the Drupal migration system to fit this model, I immediately run into the fact that in Drupal's APIs "load" means exactly the opposite - pulling data out of storage rather than pushing it in. So, our model is "source, process, destination"...

I've made a related issue to deal with UI texts (and some terminology) as it currently stands: #2738393: Compile UI (Text) Standards for module developers

Although slightly relevant here, but just to let you know: here's the current list of one-word long terms that Drupal terminology uses. Of course, not all of them carry meaning in Drupal jargon on its own, but anyway, it maybe helpful to briefly scroll through.