Wikipedia:Avoid weasel words

This page is part of the Manual of Style, and is considered a guideline for Wikipedia. The consensus of many editors formed the conventions described here, and Wikipedia articles should heed these guidelines. Before making any major changes to these guidelines, please use the discussion page to ensure that your changes reflect consensus.

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

Editors will disagree. That is an inevitability. As a function of this, editors will add statements to articles that they consider to be facts and have their contributions removed, because other editors will consider these same statements false or misleading. With the impetus to add information to the article on the one hand and this sieving process on the other, what often results is an awkward compromise in the form of weasel words - Curious verbal creatures which superficially seem to be establishing an objective tone without involving actual objectivity of any sort or attributing their claims to a specific source. A pronouncement that Montreal is the best city in the world will typically get rooted out posthaste; an innocuous note that some people say that Montreal is the best city in the world will typically not.

Clearly that latter statement isn't false; some people do say that. Yet truth, while a necessary condition to the construction of a good article, is not sufficient. An article must also be relevant and informative, and this statement about what some-people-say is neither. Who are these people, one might ask? When, where and why did they say that? What kind of bias might they have? Exactly how many is some, and why is this of any significance, anyway?

Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, aspires to be authoritative by definition. Including the opinions of "some people" in an encyclopedia article implicitly gives credibility to their opinion and vouches for their relevance, because if they weren't important and relevant, they wouldn't have been included. Given the unique nature and status of Wikipedia, this makes its articles troublingly easy to exploit in this way in order to spread hearsay, personal opinion and even propaganda. The first line of defense against this is verifiability policy, which provides specific criteria for the sort of support a claim must have to survive a challenge in article space. The use of weasel words undermines this policy, and this is why editors are encouraged to, as per the title of this guideline, avoid them.

Variations

Weasel words come in a variety of flavors, but the general principle behind them- of introducing some proposition without attributing it to any concrete source- is the same. "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 forth, and so on.

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.

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...". Though the passive voice is syntactically correct, articles suffering from a massive infestation of weasel words can have their entire tone and flow thrown out of balance by this. Strunk and White recommend against the overuse of the passive voice in their Elements of Style, calling it "less direct, less bold, and less concise" than the active voice; though the use of the passive voice is not in itself incorrect and can be appropriate, too much of it can obstruct what might otherwise be Brilliant Prose.
• 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" wraps the key point in layers of syntactic obfuscation, leaving it to be harvested out of a strange little participial phrase by the reader.
• Implicit endorsement of faulty logic. As mentioned above, 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 alternate explanations and facts that may have been ignored. In cases such as these, it is often useful to mentally substitute the claim of "clearly" with the chain of reasoning that led to the statement it qualifies; and to thoroughly consider whether it truly is sound, and whether perhaps substantial counter-arguments exist. Similarly, sentences like Many people think...—aside from leading to questions such as just how many is many—often implicitly endorse bandwagon fallacies, as their purpose is not to inform the reader about the fact that some people hold this opinion or other, but lend credibility to the statement that follows.
• Repetition. Barring prolific levels of creativity, overuse of weasel words leads to very monotonous-sounding articles due to the constraints they impose on sentence structure. It is not uncommon to encounter a section detailing different opinions on some subject following the general format of "Some argue... [..] Others respond... [..] Still others point out that [..]" ad nauseam. Without proper citation, the only criterion for the inclusion of any argument becomes that it has, indeed, been expressed by somebody at some indeterminate point in time, leading to bloated and incoherent coverage of controversial issues.

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 (Template:Weasel word) or the {{weasel-inline}} tag (Template:Weasel-inline) (which includes an internal wikilink to this page,) can be added directly to the phrase in question; same as the {{fact}} tag.

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's 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 favor of the facts that support the assertion:

• "The New York Yankees have won 26 World Series championships -- almost three times as many as any other team.".

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 reader draw their own conclusion about the Yankees' greatness based on the number of World Series the Yankees have won. Objectivity over subjectivity. Dispassion, not bias.

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. (See also: Ignore All rules).

See also

• Weasel word
• Wikipedia:Avoid peacock terms
• Wikipedia:Words to avoid
• Wikipedia:Avoid trite expressions
• Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles
• Template:Weasel
• Template:WW (small weasel template)