User:Vegan416/sandbox/Zionism

21st century Encyclopedias
The discussion here is not about whether we have to include in the article the debate on whether Zionism is "colonialist"/"colonizing". I don't think there is really any objection against describing this debate in the article. The discussion here is whether Zionism should be described as "colonialist"/ "colonizing" in the first defining sentence or in the lead section at all, in wikivoice. This is mainly a question of DUE and NPOV. I present here a policy-based argument against including this description in the lead.

Here is a relevant policy statement from No original research "Reliable tertiary sources can help provide broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources and may help evaluate due weight, especially when primary or secondary sources contradict each other. Some tertiary sources are more reliable than others. Within any given tertiary source, some entries may be more reliable than others." Tertiary sources are defined there as "publications such as encyclopedias and other compendia that summarize, and often quote, primary and secondary sources."

So I decided to look at encyclopedias articles whose title is Zionism. Following the policy point that "some tertiary sources are more reliable than others" I used only encyclopedias published by reputable punishers, and also almost all (if not all) of the editors and writers are scholars in relevant fields. Also, following Levivich opinion that only 21st century sources should be used in this discussion I used only encyclopedia editions that were first published in the 21st century. I collected about 30 such encyclopedias.

The results are pretty clear. The vast majority of encyclopedias do not describe Zionism as "colonialist"/"colonizing" in the first defining sentence or in their lead section at all. It seems clear that most of the scholars that edited and wrote those encyclopedia articles think that the description of Zionism as "colonialist"/"colonizing" is either wrong, or disputable, or simply just not important enough to make the head-lines. I think Wikipedia should follow this majority.

Comments:


 * 1) The encyclopedias are ordered by publication date of the edition that is used. This is of course not an exhaustive list of all possibly relevant encyclopedias in the 21st century. There were encyclopedias that were not accessible to me at all, and its very likely there are others that I missed entirely in my searches. However I believe this presents a significant portion, maybe even the majority of relevant encyclopedias that have an article about Zionism. So I think it's unlikely that the results would change significantly when more encyclopedias are found (and anyone is of course free to look for more).
 * 2) I provided links to most of the sources. There were a few that I found offline in my library. For these I supplied the text of the first paragraph in the footnotes. Images can be sent on demand.
 * 3) With regard to opening defining sentence (see MOS:FIRST) specifically it might be useful to also look at reputable dictionaries, which are the experts in defining subjects in one sentence. Looking at 6 of the leading online dictionaries (1 2 3 4 5 6) we find that none of them mentions colonization/colonialism in its definition of Zionism.

Introductory books published by academic publishers:
https://www.google.co.il/books/edition/Israel/4Oko_CcbdXgC?hl=en&gbpv=1?

https://archive.org/details/israelpalestinec0000gelv_k1z6/page/6/mode/2up?q=zionism

Introductory books published by other reputable publishers:
https://archive.org/details/palestineisraelc0000harm_h6a5_4thed/page/50/mode/2up (not sure if it is a reputable publisher)

Historically interesting Encyclopedias
https://archive.org/details/encyclopaedia-britannica-10ed-1903/Vol%2033%20%28STR-ZWO%29%20193479139.23/page/926/mode/2up