Explain how to handle terminated services and how to rename services

[clementbiron]

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[MattiSG]

Great!

[MattiSG]

Please notify OpenTermsArchive/contrib-declarations#906 once merged!

[pg-adrian]

Hi all, thank you for including me in this! I have a question regarding considering "renaming a service as akin to opening a new one".

In the case of Twitter/X we see that it really mostly is renaming, so the Twitter policies are mostly continued and just the "Twitter" in the policies is replaced with "X". So by terminating the existing service and opening a new one for a renaming, are we not blurring this continuity for users of the data?

[MattiSG]

Through discussion, we reached a conclusion that it was more relevant to leave it to the analysts / consumers to decide how to join data. It is rather trivial, at analysis stage, to fuse Twitter and X from the dataset: just merge the folders.
However, if we use only one name, we make it hard to discover the data: will users expect X to contain historical 2011 data of Twitter? If we keep the original name, will it still make sense in 5 years when nobody remembers anymore that Make used to be called Integromat?

Now, there might be a case for adding metadata on renames. At this stage, we recommend doing in at commit level, by having a single commit with message “Rename Twitter to X” that contains both the termination of Twitter and the tracking of X.

This example is especially interesting since we observe that the transition of terms is very gradual: while one can pinpoint the official renaming date announcement, or the incorporated name change, it is impossible to pinpoint that transition in the terms as the renaming is applied apparently opportunistically, with terms still being rewritten in the last weeks, several months after the official name change.

The policy we described here is the current best practice, that does not mean it is final 🙂 We would happily consider improvements or complete changes if there are clear use cases and applicable proposals!