Consider renaming the "Blame" button to "Inspect"

In 9.3 (gitlab-ce!10378), we changed the "Blame" button to "Annotate" to promote a blameless culture.

This change was reverted mostly based on the fact that blame is an established term.

That being said, I think it's still relevant to change "Blame" to something else for a few reasons (I've gathered the arguments from the original MR):

  • the word "blame" is negative, independently from each person's understanding of what the git blame command does (see its definition in various dictionaries)
  • not every GitLab users know the git blame command so having a "Blame" button can seem very strange to a GitLab newcomer
  • GitLab's buttons don't map 1-1 to Git commands. e.g. in Git you use git log, in GitLab you click Commits (for a branch/tag) or History (for a file)
  • not everyone has the same understanding of what the command does:
    • is it to "blame someone for a change"?
    • is it to "blame a commit" (which is not semantically correct btw)?

Annotate was chosen because:

  • it is neutral
  • it is used in the actual description of the git blame command
  • it is used in some IDEs (e.g. RubyMine)

Other alternative suggested:

  • Authorship: even though the "blame" feature actually shows the commits info, which contain author info
  • Trace: that's actually how GitHub describes this feature in its doc: https://help.github.com/articles/tracing-changes-in-a-file/
  • Inspect: as for "Trace", this one is nice because it's an action on the user' side

Regardless of the choice we'll make, I think we'll need to add a tooltip that explains what the button does (see the great suggestions from Mike here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10378#note_33166736)


As the original contributor said, I think we have a good opportunity to stand out from the crowd by using an alternative word here (we already do for things like "Merge Request").

Edited Nov 29, 2018 by Rémy Coutable
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