Recommended Terminology Changes

The following terminology changes have been suggested.

Election

• Formerly Consensus Process
• Why: Because "consensus” generally means an agreement, and not the process of arriving at that agreement, we are forced to use "consensus process", a clumsy phrase when repeated many times. Election is easier to say, read, and write, and serves as a good metaphor for what is happening: a group of voters (validators) is electing transactions to be included in the next ledger.

Endorsements

• Formerly Validations
• Why: Reduce confusion and ambiguity with fully validated ledgers

Endorsed Ledger

• Formerly Closed Ledger
• Why: "Closed ledger" has come to mean different things in different contexts. We say a validator "closes" its open ledger at the start of an election, but that the last "closed ledger" is the ledger coming out of an election, the result of applying the elected transactions to the parent ledger, which may differ from the ledger that was "closed" at the start of the election. "Endorsed ledger" matches the term "endorsement" and makes clear their relationship: an endorsed ledger is a ledger for which the validator published an endorsement.

Downvote

• Formerly Veto
• Why: No one has veto power
• Opposite is upvote

Upvote

• Formerly support
• Why: Reduce confusion and ambiguity with servers that code-wise support an amendment but currently do not want the amendment to activate

LedgerEntryID

• Formerly index or LedgerIndex
• Why: Reduce confusion between ledger_index, index, and LedgerIndex. ledger_index and LedgerIndex often appear very close to one another in a single API response despite having different data types and referring to totally different things. Also, a single API response may use both LedgerIndex and index to refer to the same thing, on top of using ledger_index to refer to something different.

Old name	New Name	Used In
index	LedgerEntryID	Serialization of ledger entry objects, including from API responses from account_info, account_objects, ledger (in the state data returned with accounts: true or full: true), ledger_data¹, ledger_entry, and book_offers.
LedgerIndex	LedgerEntryID	Serialization of transaction metadata in all places that occurs.
index	entry_id	In ledger_entry requests