Wikipedia:Linked

In general, the voice of an encyclopedia article should be clear, unambiguous, neutral and verifiable. This stands in contrast to other forms of writing, such as journalistic or literary. While these sources are reliable, not every turn of phrase they use is appropriate to be written verbatim in a Wikipedia article.

In a newspaper, for example, writing is typically done under constraints of space and time, leading to more concise expressions; it is common to allude to information, rather than explain it precisely and in full detail. This is partly due to the need to write short and understandable articles, and partly due to labor and time constraints. Extensive research into background details of a story tends to be both unnecessary and unhelpful for conveying its central point. While it's reasonable to assume that background details and information provided in news stories are generally true, they don't generally constitute a deliberate editorial statement on the part of their source publication.

For example, if a news story is about a politician's remarks on some controversial issue, the paper doesn't hire political science professors to objectively determine which label to apply to them. It might say that two things "have ties to" one another without providing further detail. Or in a literary magazine, a comparison may be made by saying that something "smacks of" or "is reminiscent of" another thing. There may be a causal relationship, or there might not, and the author may simply intend to draw a parallel between two unconnected things. These things do not mean that the newspaper or the magazine are unreliable — they are simply linguistic quirks appropriate for one medium and inappropriate for another.

On Wikipedia, we are not writing under a deadline, and we are not forbidden to describe things in full detail; when we read colorful phrases in our sources, we should attempt to figure out what actual state of affairs in the real world they refer to, and then write that.

The Manual of Style lists many "words to watch", in a number of categories.

"Linked to", "connected to"

"Well, our sources say both of these guys are linked to capitalism, so how different could they be?"

In newspapers and literary publications, it is common to hear that one thing is "linked to", "connected to" or "has ties to" another thing. This is useful shorthand to convey the general idea of a relationship between the things. But it doesn't provide much actual information. For example, are wet streets "linked to" rainy weather, or is rainy weather "linked to" wet streets?

In news writing, it may be appropriate to say that two things "have ties to" one another without providing further detail. But in writing encyclopedia articles, we can and should do better than this.

To say that two things are "linked", "connected", or "have ties to" one another is very difficult to evaluate as a concrete claim. This is because they are extremely broad claims that can encompass virtually anything. For example: Nikita Khrushchev, Josip Broz Tito, John Scott and Mark Kaminsky all "had ties to" the Soviet Union. However, this phrase means vastly different things for all three.

• In Krushchev's case, his "ties" were that he not only spent his entire life as a citizen of the USSR, but also as a deeply devoted member of the Communist Party, achieving very high bureaucratic positions, eventually becoming its General Secretary, from which position he ruled the country for a full decade.
• In Tito's case, his "ties" were that, as the leader of Yugoslavia, he was once in a loyal alliance with the Soviet Union, but eventually became strongly opposed to it, and it eventually started sending assassins to kill him.
• In Scott's case, his "ties" were that he lived there for ten years and then came back.
• In Kaminsky's case, his "ties" were that he was an American spy taking pictures of military installations there.

With this in mind, you can see that it is somewhat confusing to read that someone or something "had ties to" the Soviet Union. After all, it can indicate basically any kind of relationship: they loved it, they hated it, they served it loyally, they were the target of its assassins, they proudly led it, or they were actively working against it as covert agents. Virtually no information is actually conveyed by the phrase. The main thing we learn from the sentence "A has ties to B" is that someone mentioned A and B in the same sentence.

Far ultra-wing

Writers attempting to describe a person's occupation, ideology, or "vibe" will try to make their description illustrative, engaging and informative. Not necessarily in that order. The amount of editorial supervision and involvement varies based on the nature of the piece, the nature of the claim, and the publication it's being run in. In general, though, newspaper stories are usually about specific events; they are seldom entirely about somebody's personal attributes.

People will also be given different descriptions based on who's writing the story, and what kind of story it is: an article about somebody breaking a big story might refer to them as a "journalist", an article about their Twitter following might call them an "influencer", and an article about a controversial political statement might call them a "pundit". While there may be significant academic and historical distinctions to be made between, say, "left-wing", "far-left", "leftist" and "ultra-left", these are not generally made by news publications and opinion writing. They do not have an army of political science professors standing on call to deliberate solemnly on which label to use.

On Wikipedia, however, there is a popular delusion to the contrary. There are hundreds of lengthy arguments, which stretch on to thousands of words on a regular basis, about what terms must be used to describe people and organizations and ideas. These arguments make extremely frequent reference to what "sources say", and to the reliability of these sources. The idea behind this is that, if there is a New York Times article calling somebody a "provocateur", this means that "the New York Times" called them that; i.e. it is an official announcement of the stance of the paper's editorial board.

There is very little evidence that this is even slightly true.

In reality, nobody besides Wikipedians seems to really care much about these distinctions. The publications that make them certainly don't give them this much weight, and indeed, the same newspapers will usually describe the same things with different labels depending on a wide variety of factors. Furthermore, to the overwhelming majority of their readers, there is no actual difference between a newspaper article calling some guy on Twitter a "socialist" or a "communist" or a "Communist", or a "fascist" versus a "Fascist" versus a "nazi" versus a "Nazi". If you care enough to make a distinction between these things, you are typically not the target audience in the first place, and at any rate, you're an advanced enough newsreader that you are capable of reading his tweets yourself and deciding on your own without assistance.

What, then, is our alternative? Certainly, it is not appropriate for us to write a description of somebody in an encyclopedia article based on reading his tweets ourselves, unless we wanted to have every article start with "is an American university professor and obsequious worm" or "is an authoritarian idiot best known for possessing neither a spine nor a brain". I can definitely think of a few people I'd like to describe this way, but I don't think it would be good for the project in the long run (and of course we'd have trouble agreeing on which people).

So what do we say about people's political leanings, ideological affiliations, and such in the lead? Well, do we have to do it in the lead? Can we do it in the lead? I think we have to accept that sometimes the answer is just "no".

It's clear that writing a comprehensive or useful article about a subject often includes mentioning its ideology, political affiliations, or labels in some way. However, I think that because of a general lack of objective sourcing that can be used to cite such things — despite our occasional bizarre insistence otherwise — it is something that should be done in context, summarizing (and attributing) what sources have to say about the subject, which means it will typically take up a good bit of space. And if describing something in the appropriate and necessary amount of detail is impossible to do in a few short words of a sentence fragment, we shouldn't insist on trying to do it anyway. By analogy: imagine that we had an optional infobox that required us to select someone's nationality from a list, and the list had England but not Scotland or Ireland. In this case, it would be inane to simply list all Scotsmen or Irishmen as "English" — and "limited space in the infobox" would not excuse it. Especially if we already have their nationality listed in the article itself: it would be far better to not have anything in the infobox, and expect our readers to have an attention span longer then five seconds, than to give them false or misleading information and then later correct it.

In some cases, I suspect (and at least once have seen people actually say) that the real reason for arguments over labels in the lead sentence is because many search engines, social media websites, and voice assistants only pull the first couple sentences for their descriptions. This means that anything that can be claimed in the first sentence — no matter how much of a stretch, and even if it's corrected later in the article — runs a chance of becoming accepted as true by algorithms elsewhere on the Internet, as well as people who use those algorithms rather than reading Wikipedia articles. "If we don't label them first thing," the argument goes, "many people won't see the label at all". But I disagree: in this case, it would seem even more important not to apply contentious labels. In fact, if there's anything that this state of affairs convinces me of, it's that we should be aggressively policing the first sentences of our articles to avoid saying anything besides bare objective facts (i.e. name, date of birth, and nationality).

Wikipedia does not have an obligation to compromise the accuracy of its articles for the sake of people who don't read them. To put it simply: why is it an issue that people who don't read an article don't get to learn what it says? Anyone (whether human or machine) who's actually interested in learning this information is given ample opportunity to do so by having it in the body text. Some object to this on the basis that it's "censorship" or "whitewashing" — I don't think this is true. It would be far better to not have anything in the first sentence of a lead, and expect our readers to have an attention span longer then a few seconds, than to give them false or misleading information on the basis that maybe sometimes they will keep reading long enough to find out the truth.