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.
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus