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Text and/or other creative content from African slave trade was copied or moved into Slavery with this edit on 10:03, 6 May 2009. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists.
Just a non editor passing through. I didn't ask for this, but, can someone with more wiki skills follow the procedure to establish a consensus for this alteration? I think the original poster had a point and a consensus is worth pursuing. 173.222.1.130 (talk) 23:40, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's been a few discussions about this—I forget where, but I think there was one at the Village pump—in short, there's no consensus to mandate the use of one term over the other. Both terms are well attested in the reliable sources we base usage off of, and both can be argued to reflect different shades of meaning that may be worth emphasizing in different contexts. Remsense ‥ 论23:47, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This discussion over terminology was never resolved. There was a long back and forth which eventually went quiet and then it was deleted by the bot (17 May 2023 if you want to find it). The alteration in terminology was asked about again earlier this year, but not discussed. I will not resurrect the long discussion, but repaste an edited version of the position I put forward at the end of that original discussion, which is where things ended:
This change of terminology effectively amounts not only to removing the word 'slave' from the lexicon, but to have no word for that thing that 'slave' refers to. This, it must surely be admitted, is extremely novel and unusual. No we mustn't have a word for that thing is an argument I've heard nowhere before from anybody, ever. Even Voldermort was called 'He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named'. Also note that the term 'enslaved person' and 'slave' are not synonyms, for example just try substituting the term in this article. All these substitutions are transparently motivated by the desire to condemn various things associated with slavery by using new words that have other associations because they refer to something different. The only reason say, 'enslaver' is preferred to 'slave owner' is because it sounds worse, but it only sounds worse because it refers to a different thing (enslaving a free person). The same goes for the other terms. The second the replacement of the term becomes universally used and accepted, the replacment becomes pointless, creating an imperative for a constant roll-over of terms (the 'Euphemism Treadmill'), which is frankly intolerable to the general population and undermines the very purpose of language (communication). LastDodo (talk) 17:05, 27 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]