Any characterization of behavior is subject to the criticism that it could
be replaced with a description of the phenomenon. We use these forms as a
shorthand for such descriptions. "Sneak attack", for example, can serve in
place of a long description explaining how a plan to declare war at 6 AM and
attack at 7 failed because of a delay in decoding.
The words "patriotic", "brave", "noble" and
"democratic" come to mind in
this context. These are words which express point of view. They don't need
to be banned, just used consciously.
Fred
From: zero 0000 <nought_0000(a)yahoo.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2004 01:28:11 -0800 (PST)
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Terrorism
> 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.
Since my remark indicated above has now been quoted several time,
I thought I might explain it. I don't -really- think that
"terrorism", or any other word, should be banned. Rather, I was
making a comment on the usage of the word in Wikipedia: in my
opinion it is misused so much that we would be better off without
any uses at all. However, of course the problem should be tackled
by education and not by legislation.
Let me suggest a golden rule that might be applied to many issues
in addition to this one:
Golden Rule: Tell the reader what the facts are;
don't tell the reader what to think about them.
According to this criterion, some usages of "terrorism" are just
fine: "The US State Department added Microsoft Corporation to its
list of terrorist organizations". Some usages are NOT fine:
"A Microsoft terrorist blew himself up at the 2007 Apple
Convention, killing 27 innocent Mac-heads". The reason I don't
like this usage of "terrorist" is that all the information in the
sentence is still there if the word is removed. Actually the
word was used to sneak the writer's opinion into the sentence.
We should just present the facts and allow the reader to form
the opinions.
Other uses of "terrorism" in Wikipedia just make me cringe.
"Many people regard this to be terrorism" is about my least
favorite. In my view the majority of similar sentences in
Wikipedia were put there by people who wanted to insert their
own opinions. They knew they couldn't write "It is terrorism"
or "I think it is terrorism" so they wrote "Many people regard..."
instead. Of course if a key aspect of the topic of the article
is public opinion that would be a different situation (but then
I'd hope to see some actual opinion poll data or something).
Zero.
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