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feat: add speciesist language rules as community example#284

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stuckvgn wants to merge 1 commit intoget-woke:mainfrom
stuckvgn:feat/speciesist-language-rules
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feat: add speciesist language rules as community example#284
stuckvgn wants to merge 1 commit intoget-woke:mainfrom
stuckvgn:feat/speciesist-language-rules

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@stuckvgn
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Summary

  • Adds a community-contributed rule file for detecting speciesist language patterns
  • Includes 30+ rules covering violent animal idioms, infrastructure metaphors with animal exploitation origins, and animal-as-object terms
  • Each rule provides clearer, more professional alternatives
  • Rules are categorized under speciesism category for easy filtering

Context

Every major inclusive language scanner covers racial, gender, and ableist language — none currently include speciesism. Recent peer-reviewed research has established that AI systems and language tools encode speciesist bias:

  • Hagendorff, Bossert, Tse & Singer (2023). "Speciesist bias in AI." AI and Ethics. DOI: 10.1007/s43681-023-00380-w
  • Takeshita et al. (2022). "Speciesist language and nonhuman animal bias in English masked language models." Information Processing & Management.
  • Leach et al. (2023). "Speciesism in everyday language." British Journal of Social Psychology.

This contribution follows woke's philosophy of letting users decide what's inclusive — the rules are provided as an opt-in example configuration, not as default rules. Users can adopt them via:

# Use directly as a remote config
woke -c https://raw.githubusercontent.com/get-woke/woke/main/examples/speciesist-language.yaml

# Or copy rules into your project's .woke.yaml

All rules use the speciesism category, so users who include them alongside other rules can easily exclude them with:

exclude_categories:
  - speciesism

Examples

Phrase Suggested Alternative Severity
"kill two birds with one stone" "accomplish two things at once" warning
"cattle vs. pets" (infrastructure) "ephemeral vs. persistent" warning
"canary deployment" "progressive rollout" info
"monkey patch" "runtime patch" info
"guinea pig" "test subject" warning

Test plan

  • Rules file parses correctly with woke CLI
  • Term matching works with word boundaries where specified
  • No false positives on common technical terms

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👋 Thanks for submitting your first PR!

Please be sure to read and follow our Code of Conduct and Contributing guide.

⭐️ Is your org or open source project using woke? If so, we'd love for you to be included in the 'Who uses woke' list at https://github.com/get-woke/woke/blob/main/docs/about.md#who-uses-woke.

@stuckvgn
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Relevant precedent since this PR was opened: webpack just merged equivalent speciesism rules into their docs CI — webpack/webpack.js.org#7880. Same idioms, same framing, Vale-based. Noting here as a signal that this category is landing elsewhere in the ecosystem.

@stuckvgn
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Friendly ping @caitlinelfring — this adds speciesist language rules as a community example. For context, webpack merged equivalent rules last week. Would appreciate a look when convenient.

@stuckvgn
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Closing this PR — on reflection, this change may not be the right fit for this project. Thanks for your time!

@stuckvgn stuckvgn closed this Mar 14, 2026
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