Wikipedia:Avoid weasel words

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This page documents an English Wikipedia style guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

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This page in a nutshell: Avoid using phrases such as "some people say" without providing sources.

Weasel words are small phrases attached to the beginning of a statement, such as "some argue that..." or "critics say...", etc.. A serious problem with weasel-worded statements, aside from their veracity, is that their implication is misleading or too vague to substantiate.

With weasel words, one can imply a statement is true when it may be no truer than its inverse. For example, an editor might preface the statement "Montreal is the best city in the world" with a disclaimer: "some people say that Montreal is the best city in the world". This is true: some people do say that Montreal is the best city in the world. The problem is that the reverse is true as well (some people say Montreal is not the best city in the world, and some go further and say that it is the worst), and it is thus easy to write a misinformative, slanted article composed of nothing but 'facts' like these, using Wikipedia to spread hearsay, personal opinion and propaganda. All it takes is for somebody to add "Critics have asserted that..." to a statement, and there is a danger that the casual reader will take their word for it.

Another problem is that weasel words can imply that a statement is more controversial than it is. For example, saying "some people claim that The Beatles were a popular band" unnecessarily raises a (false) question about the statement's truth.

If a statement is true without weasel words, remove them. If they are needed for the statement to be true, consider removing the statement. If there is a genuine opinion make the preface more specific. Who are these people? When, where and why did they say that? What kind of bias might they have? How many is "some"? If you consider the different answers these questions might have, you can see how meaningless the "some people say" qualification is. To assist users in deciding how to attribute ideas more precisely, the Wikipedia verifiability policy provides specific criteria for the support a statement must have for it to remain in an article unchallenged. This is one of Wikipedia's core content policies, determining the type and quality of material that is acceptable in articles, and it is this policy that weasel words undermine.

1 Variations
2 Other problems
3 Improving weasel-worded statements
4 Follow the spirit, not the letter
5 See also
6 References

[edit] Variations

There are different variations on weasel wording, with the general principle of introducing some proposition without attributing it to any concrete source. "Most scientists believe that..." fails to provide any evidence that this is indeed the case, or to clarify just where between 50% and 100% "most" is, for that matter. The case is similar with things that are apparently true "according to some studies" or "contrary to popular opinion". "It has been proven that" allusion to proof does not constitute proof, "Science says" that science is an abstract concept which in actuality is not capable of speech, and "it could be argued" that the no original research policy is there for a reason. And so on, and so forth.

It is, of course, acceptable to introduce some fact or opinion and attribute it in an inline citation. e.g. "Research by Wong et al, 1996, has shown that rabies can be cured by acupuncture".

And at the bottom of the page:

W.F. Wong (1996). "Acupuncture: An effective cure for rabies". J. Rabid Med. 345: 33-67.

[edit] Other problems

The use of weasel words often creates other issues and problems in the text. Some of these are:

Wordiness. Weasel words constitute sentence stuffing; they make sentences longer without carrying any information.
Passive voice. Though it is in principle possible to make weasel-worded statements in the active voice, in practice it is often much more convenient to resort to the passive voice, e.g. "It has been said that...". While syntactically correct and sometimes appropriate, too much of it can throw an afflicted article's entire tone and flow out of balance.
Convoluted syntax. Weasel words require some convoluted syntax to get a point across. "A square has four sides" is a simple sentence; "Though not universally, squares are widely regarded as having an even number of sides that has been conjectured by experts in the field to be approximately four" is not. We should aim to inform, not to provide challenges in extreme reading comprehension.
Implicit endorsement of faulty logic.
- The word "clearly" and other words of its kind are often used to tell the reader that some established statements have brought conclusion to an argument or discussion. In some cases, this is all but true; in many others, it does injustice to alternative explanations and facts that may have been ignored. To test for whether the use of "clearly" is justified is relatively simple- substitute it for the logical leap it's making, that is, that the already established A, B, and C imply that necessarily Z. Then ponder, really necessarily? May this conclusion be challenged? Has it been challenged?
- The Many people think... type of statement is often a thinly-veiled bandwagon fallacy. It wasn't put there to establish the context of the following statement (and naturally enough, it doesn't do that in the least bit). Rather, it serves to inspire awe and lead the reader's train of thought along the lines of, "oh, many people say this, obviously this must have a semblance of credibility to it".
Repetition. There are only so many creative ways to phrase the general idea of "it has been asserted that", and an article constructed entirely of variations on this theme can get painfully repetitive. The requirement to properly cite and specify exactly who has asserted what, when and why is what stands between the article and a bloated, incoherent piece documenting everything that might have conceivably been said on the subject by anybody, ever. (In some particularly dreadful cases, unchecked articles degenerate all the way to thread mode - a continuous dialogue of partisan commentary along the lines of "Some argue... [..] Others respond... [..] Still others point out that [..]" ad nauseam.)

[edit] Improving weasel-worded statements

The {{weasel}} tag can be added to the top of an article or section to draw attention to the presence of weasel words. For less drastic cases, the {{weasel word}} tag (^[who?]), the {{weasel-inline}} tag (^{[weasel words]}), or the {{Who?}} tag (^[who?]) (all of which include an internal wikilink to this page) can be added directly to the phrase in question; same as the {{fact}} tag (^{[citation needed]}).

The key to improving weasel words in articles is either a) to name a source for the opinion or b) to change opinionated language to concrete facts.

Peacock terms are especially hard to deal with without using weasel words. Again, consider the sentence "The Yankees are the greatest baseball team in history." It is tempting to rephrase this in a weaselly way, for example, "Some people think that the Yankees are the greatest baseball team in history." But how can this opinion be qualified with an opinion holder? There are millions of Yankees fans and hundreds of baseball experts who would pick the Yankees as the best team in history. Instead, it would be better to eliminate the middleman of mentioning this opinion entirely, in favour of the facts that support the assertion:

"The New York Yankees have won 26 World Series championships—about three times as many as any other team."^[1]

This fact suggests that the Yankees are a superlative baseball franchise, rather than simply the greatest baseball team in history. The idea is to let the readers draw their own conclusions about the Yankees' greatness based on the number of World Series the Yankees have won. Objectivity over subjectivity. Dispassion, not bias.

[edit] Follow the spirit, not the letter

As with any rule of thumb, this guideline should be balanced against other needs for the text, especially the need for brevity and clarity. While ideally every assertion and assumption that is not necessarily true would have the various positions on it detailed and referenced, in practice much of human knowledge relies on the probably true rather than the necessarily true, and actually doing this would result in the article devolving into an incoherent jumble of backtracking explanations and justifications.

This means that opting for or against explicit citation ought not to be an automatic process, but rather a judgment call. How controversial is the statement being made? How prominent are alternative views? How relevant would introducing the controversy be to the progression of this specific article — relevant enough to be worth whatever strain on the narrative that will result? These are the important questions to be asking when dealing with citation issues.