Daniel Mayer wrote:
Viajero wrote:
"Terrorism" is a lot more than just a
technical term; it carries
emotional baggage and implies a moral judgement (like calling
someone a "vandal" in Wikipedia!).
Like the words 'racism', 'holocaust' and 'massacre'? I
guess the articles on
those topics will have to be renamed as well.
That's trivialization.
Passing moral
judgements on subjects is obviously
incompatible with NPOV.
And NPOV obviously cannot operate in article titles since we have to choose
just one term for the title (thus choosing one POV). Common usage with the
caveats of ambiguity and unreasonable offensiveness is our rule for page
titles. Applying NPOV to titles would result in ponderously long titles that
would for practical reasons be useless as titles and near impossible to
remember for linking purposes.
You apply NPOV to titles by avoiding characterizations. This makes
titles shorter, not longer.
On the Talk
page of [[King David Hotel bombing]] Zero wrote
something awhile back to the effect that the word "terrorist"
should be banned from every article except [[Terrorism]]. I
am inclined to agree with him.
I'm sorry but this is an absurd position to have and I do hope you re-consider
it. Not only would it result in [[Terrorism]] becoming an orphan, but it
would whitewash a great many articles. If and when it is relevant to say that
X said Y about Z then we should say it!
If so, say it in the text.
Again blacklisting terms is *very* bad and reminds me
of something I read in
the appendix of the book 1984 in which Orwell described Newspeak. The goal of
the totalitarian state in 1984 had with Newspeak was thought control: By
dropping certain terms from the language the concepts behind those terms
would fall away from the conscious thoughts of people. Eliminating the word
"freedom" for example, would help to stop the transmission of
freedom-oriented ideas and thus would ease any want in the population for it.
Orwell's society did not ban the word "freedom". It just reserved
the
right to insist that you understood it in a politically correct way.
Totalitarian principles are more effectively spread when the subject
population believes that it has freely adopted those ideas.
Eliminating 'terrorist' from Wikipedia would
cover-up the fact that many
people consider terrorism to be a real thing and something that is in a
special class of atrocities.
I'm not saying that the word should be completely banned; there are
places for it. Just not in most titles.
Ec