While working on a frontend equivalent of this policy, the names "provider" and "consumer" were proposed. In this document we currently have "author" and "user" to mean the same.
These words seem overloaded given an "author" could mean many things - such as editing documentation, editing wiki pages. A "user" could be interpreted as a user of the code.
How about we change all instances of "author" to "provider" and all instances of "user" to "consumer" ?
These words seem overloaded
This document is addressed to a software development context. Do you think there is ambiguity in this context for who the author of a code interface is, or who the user of a code interface is?
In your experience browsing GitHub issue trackers and npm READMEs, do you find that people don't often use and understand terms like "author" and "user", or that these caused confusion? Perhaps an alternate set of terms is more often there that we could borrow from?
If we remove context from the equation, I believe it would be very challenging to find a term that is well known (i.e. not too novel, or unknown to ESLs), easily understood, and ambigious regardless of context.
The word "consumer" seems certainly ambigious. Like "user", a "customer" often refers the end-user (possibly more often?). In my own experience, I find developers of open source software more often refer to themselves as "users" than as "consumers". (Most often would be "developer", but I mean cases where another term is used to disambiguate.) The term "consumer" might be a bit too corporate-y for FLOSS culture? Businesses and commerical enterprises refer to their users as customers.
Companies also tend to think of, and present, themselves as "provider" when they create software or services. This too carries a similar ambiguity. E.g. software consultancies that build WP or MW plugins, WordPress and MediaWiki hosting providers, companies like BlueSpice. I imagine most every developer working as user of MediaWiki core to build an extension, is providing something to someone. Even if merely as hoster of your own wiki with a custom extension, you'd be the site/content provider building on MW software. If I drop "Who is your provider?" in an unspecified technology-adjacent context, I think one tends to think first of web hosting, ISP, and telecom companies; Not easily would I think of the author of one of our npm dependencies, from whom I use the stable interface.
I'm not arguing that "provider" is unclear, but I do think, if we ignore the document context, that it is certainly ambigious. I feel the term "provider" also feels a bit less personal and human than an "author".
Note that we use term author a fair bit in our technical writing when we talk about ourselves as the authors (or "maintainers") of software, including AUTHORS.txt attribution, Git commit authors, author credits from extension.json for Special:Version, and more in search.
