We're all Tanuki

I'm slightly concerned about this, not because is bad but rather because nintendo is very protective about their IP's.

For example:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/nintendo-issues-dmca-takedown-for-super-mario-bros-commodore-64-port/ https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/29/17793044/pokemon-essentials-nintendo-takedown-fandom-wiki

@sytses If you are Tanuki, we should update source/company/team/index.html.md for https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/

MEET OUR TEAM

→ MEET OUR TANUKI?

[...] The GitLab Inc. team consists of the following 687 team members and their 156+ pets. [...]

→ The GitLab Inc. team consists of the following 687 tanuki and their 156+ pets.?

And also we should consider renaming the path /company/team/ on about.gitlab.com.

I don't have a strong opinion, but referring to team members this way might sound strange to some; as a loanword, it sounds exotic and fun to most of us, but it's really just an animal name—not any different than calling team members dogs, cats, bears, or mice in English and that might not go over well.

If we can come up with a variation to make a new word of our own, that might work better.

• Labnuki
• Tanulabber
• Gitnukers
• GitLabbians
• GitLaboids
• Labnukians
• LabCorpers
• Laboids
• LabCommers

GitLabradors?

IMHO, I think this could be confusing for people outside of GitLab.

Seconded. I can't imagine using Tanuki in a blog post title for example!

I'm not a big fan, I think it is more ambiguous and confusing, especially to people who are not as familiar with GitLab

Edit, looks like I just repeated @cheriholmes, my bad

I prefer GitLabbers. Like Googlers, Facebookers, etc.

GitLabbers.

I disagree with this use of Tanuki, but I would humbly suggest an alternative Taxonomy.

What if we used "Tanuki Team" as the community-at-large, and reclaimed the term GitLabbers as the subset of members of the "Tanuki Team" that work for GitLab? That still builds a sense of community and a tag that we can follow the "Everyone can Contribute" ethos, but allows us to use what feels like a more natural term to describe those of us employed at GitLab?

This feels more consistent with our brand, and associating the Team ideal with the whole community I would argue is more inclusive. Thoughts?

I would vote for "Contribute Community" and "Contributers" as the community-at-large and its members, and "GitLabbers" as those who work for GitLab.

I think the community-at-large is very diverse and there is no clear separation line between people who contribute to software useful for GitLab and software not useful for GitLab. For example there are people contributing to Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ruby Gems, Go lang, Go modules, Grafana, Git, Curl (used by Git), Openssl, the Linux kernel, Ubuntu, gcc, gdb, valgrind, Vim, Emacs, ... All of those contributions can be useful to GitLab more or less directly and I don't see those contributors feeling included if we called them "Tanuki" or "Tanuki Team member". So "Contributers" or "Contributors" and "Contribute Community" or "Contributor Community" feel more inclusive to me.

I think plain English, self explanatory names are best. Tanuki does not obviously refer to people, would always require explanation, and it seems strange to refer to people by the name of an animal.

---

Staff is what is on our user profile if we work for GitLab Inc. but is also an engineering level.

Would it be an easier problem to solve the naming of the engineering level instead of adopting an more unusual term to refer to all the staff/tanuki/team members of GitLab?

One solution might be allowing the naming collision to exist since it seems like the situations where this would be confusing seems are relatively few compared to the alternatives. I would imagine those with Staff in their title would need to explain this to most people since the first definition of staff in most dictionaries is:

All the people employed by a particular organization.

(Source: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/staff)

Tanuki does not obviously refer to people, would always require explanation, and it seems strange to refer to people by the name of an animal.

This.

@sytses I disagree with such naming. I think it's better to write "people working at GitLab Inc." another time than introduce such confusing term.

assigned to @sytses

unassigned @dzaporozhets

closed

Thanks for the clear feedback everyone!

I documented that Tanuki is confusing.

This was done in 11dde1d9

mentioned in merge request !25408 (merged)

mentioned in merge request !37695 (merged)