nextjs - 💡(How to fix) Fix Speciesist language in documentation [1 comments, 2 participants]

Summary

An audit of the Next.js documentation (docs/ directory) for speciesist and exclusionary language was conducted. The following findings are reported for the team's consideration.

Findings

1. Canary release channel references (53 files)

The term canary appears across 53 documentation files, referring to the Next.js pre-release channel (next@canary, tree/canary/, React canary releases). This term originates from canary in a coal mine, a practice where live birds were used as expendable gas detectors in mines. The birds would die first, warning miners of danger.

While this is deeply embedded in the release infrastructure (npm tags, git branches), it is worth noting that some projects have moved away from similar terminology, and alternatives exist:

• preview (already used by many projects, e.g., TypeScript's next tag)
• nightly
• beta or alpha
• edge (already a Next.js concept)

This is understood to be an infrastructure-level change rather than a simple docs fix, but flagging it for long-term consideration.

2. Master branch references (3 files)

• docs/02-pages/02-guides/upgrading/version-9.mdx - References next-codemod-master in a GitHub archive URL. The upstream repo (vercel/next-codemod) still uses master as its default branch, so this is a functional reference.
• docs/02-pages/02-guides/internationalization.mdx - References Google Webmasters documentation (external product name).
• docs/01-app/03-api-reference/03-file-conventions/01-metadata/opengraph-image.mdx - References facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/images (external URL).

The master references in docs are either external URLs or functional references to repos that still use master, so these cannot be changed unilaterally in the docs.

3. Clean results

The following terms were searched and returned zero results, which is good: kill two birds, guinea pig, beat a dead horse, cattle, monkey patch / monkeypatch, dogfood / dogfooding, whitelist, blacklist, slave, wild goose, red herring, scapegoat, workhorse, piggyback, stampede.

Suggested actions

1. Short-term: When vercel/next-codemod migrates to main, update version-9.mdx accordingly.
2. Long-term: Consider renaming the canary release channel to preview or nightly in a future major version, and update all documentation references accordingly.

Context

Speciesist language normalizes the treatment of non-human animals as tools, expendable resources, or lesser beings. While these terms are deeply embedded in tech culture, the industry is gradually moving toward more precise, inclusive alternatives. Projects like Chromium, the IETF, and the Linux kernel have already adopted more inclusive terminology guidelines.