Mark Whitelist project as unsupported

According to Wikipedia the term "black list" was first used by the English king Charles II in 1681 to refer to a specific list of 104 people that was excluded from the general reprieve issued after the end of the second English Civil War. Subsequent uses of "blacklist" includes lists use to exclude trade unionists from getting employment in several countries, and the blacklisting of left-leaning screenwriters and actors by the US "House Un-American Activities Committee" in 1947. AFIK, the term "blacklist" has never been used in a context that has anything to do with racial profiling. I've only seen the term "whitelist" used in computing, and I believe it came into being as an obvious antonym to "blacklist".

However, in 2020, I understand that the use of the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist" are widely depreciated. I agree that our community should avoid using these terms.

As for the project in question: Whitelist, it only exists for Drupal 6, with no activity, releases or installs. It is obviously as dead as a dodo.

Please note that Webmasters cannot unpublish or change the short name of projects (that must be done by someone with more permissions than the webmasters have). AFAIK, there is no tradition on Drupal.org for unpublishing anything ever placed in the Drupal.org repo (and here, only the name is objected to, not the code).

What we can do, is to change the human facing name (aka just the "Name"). Here is a recent example of this being done: #3112796: Mark Elfsight modules unsupported, a company had incorporated the word "Drupal" in several projects, violating Dries' trademark. The company was not responsive, so we changed the human facing names of the projects.

I've already initiated the process to get the project declared unsupported, following the procedures outlined in procedures for Dealing with unsupported (abandoned) projects, please see #3154830: Mark project as unsupported.

That will get the public facing name of the changed in about two weeks time (unless the present owner responds and protests).

This in my best plan for getting the name changed. If you still want to try to get it unpublished, go ahead and try that, but you probably need to talk to the Drupal Association to make that happen.

For what I can recall, we don't unpublish a project just because its name is a phrase that is considered "unwelcoming" nowadays. As for renaming a project, it's possible to change its Name field, but not its Short name field. Even that is a change we do for different reasons, for example removing Drupal from the name of a project that didn't contain Drupal in its short name.

Deciding to unpublish a project, or rename it, because of the reason described in the IS is not upon webmasters.

Here is an empirical article with some history of the language: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/

kiamlaluno wrote:

Deciding to [...] rename it, because of the reason described in the IS is not upon webmasters.

No. The decision to avoid this term has already been taken (elsewhere - see #2993575: [meta] Remove usage of "blacklist", "whitelist", use better terms instead). I have not been able to find anyone in the community that has objected to this.

What this issue is about is getting help from webmasters to implement this decision. I've tried to suggest (comment #2) what I think is the best plan with respect to this particular project. Alternative suggestions are of course welcome.

@gisle That is a different issue, where nobody is suggesting to unpublish a project because its name.
It's not the task of webmasters implementing such decision; it's a decision only administrator users can take.

I've already initiated the process to get the project declared unsupported, following the procedures outlined in procedures for Dealing with unsupported (abandoned) projects, please see #3154830: Mark project as unsupported.

That will get the public facing name of the changed in about two weeks time (unless the present owner responds and protests).

We can do that much.

Unpublishing projects is a rare occurrence, since it is very disruptive to anyone that might be using the project. For other situations like this, we’ve stuck to marking as unsupported, #3113264: Namespace change/ Create new module. Drawing a line between what’s unused/obsolete enough to hide vs. keeping so existing users have continuity, isn’t really possible, so I think we should stick to consistently getting projects marked unsupported, with a replacement if the project is useful and maintained.

Updated issue summary text to match issue title.

Done.