Talk:Non-lethal weapon

Stun guns

Should we move all this to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stun_gun?--Countryboy603 (talk) 22:55, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

No. Someone who's wrong on the internet (talk) 19:06, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 11 June 2025

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. Most participants felt that "non-lethal weapon" remained the WP:COMMONNAME, and most of the data furnished appeared to corroborate that claim. (closed by non-admin page mover) ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 14:45, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

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Non-lethal weapon → Less-lethal weaponLess-lethal weapon – Non-lethal weapons is rarely used in the media or academia, rather less-lethal or less-than-lethal is far more common. I believe that this has changed enough since the last move request to consider it again. Poketama (talk) 09:45, 11 June 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. Frost 15:50, 18 June 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME. Both terms are certainly used, but the current title is more common. Claiming it's not used in the media is simply not true. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:22, 11 June 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose per above. Zacwill (talk) 16:17, 11 June 2025 (UTC)
• Support per my nomination and subsequent comments at the 2021 RM, which I recommend as required reading before anybody !votes here. The prevalence of "Less-lethal weapon" in reliable secondary sources is significant. @Poketama: You note that "this has changed enough since the last move request" - can you provide specific examples? 162 etc. (talk) 18:18, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

  N-grams shows less-lethal has always been more common than non-lethal.

  https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28non-lethal+weapon%29%2C%28less-lethal+weapon%29&year_start=1500&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

  It's also more common over the past 2 years on Google News hits.

  To me it appears that these kind of statistics were not taken into account in the last move request. Poketama (talk) 04:41, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

  Also re: WP:PRECISION - its flatly inappropriate to name this article non-lethal weapons. That would refer to...I don't know stink bombs? Dazzlers? Poketama (talk) 05:07, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

  @Poketama: You're using mistaken notation for Google Ngrams. With round parentheses that means (the frequency of 'non' subtracted by the frequency of 'lethal weapon'). For [the frequency of 'non-lethal weapon'] you need to use square brackets. This is the correct graph, which shows the current title in the lead. However, if you also include the plural form, then "less-lethal weapon(s)" has surpassed it. ~ Jenson (SilverLocust 💬) 08:37, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

  "Nonlethal weapons" (without a hyphen) and "non-lethal weapons" (with a hyphen) together are more common than "less-lethal weapons". [1]. Jruderman (talk) 09:30, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

  Good point. ~ Jenson (SilverLocust 💬) 19:22, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

  Thankyou for that correction!

  I also suggest including [less lethal weapons]. I think that Google Books is more likely to show technical [and biased] word use used by the Military Industrial Complex, whereas Google News [more civilian weighted, and more representative of common English] shows a higher use of less-lethal.

  Also, as they appear relatively similar in usage rate on nGrams [although that was in 2022 so we don't know how much the trend has shifted now] I think that it is even more appropriate to rely on WP:PRECISION to break the tie and use less-lethal here. Poketama (talk) 08:18, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Oppose - per above, as well as per prior 2021 RM dialog: the matter isn't merely a manner of which term happens to be more commonplace, but also if the terms selected have good, clear and well defined from authoritative sources of what it actually means. In 2021, it was noted that such formal definitions from authoritative sources exist for NL, but not for LTL to the same level of rigor, thus WP:OFFICIALNAME applies. If authoritative sources for defining LTL now do exist, then this change needs to be cited so that it can be reviewed to potentially remove this factor from consideration. -hh (talk) 18:22, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Problem with footnote #16

The linked item "Lewer, Nick; Davison, Neil (2005). "Non-lethal technologies—an overview" (PDF). Disarmament Forum. 1: 37–51." is no longer an informative PDF, but a redirect to a porn site. I'd remove it myself, but I haven't edited Wikipedia in over a decade and I don't want to risk messing it up. E^robson (T^alk) 05:25, 11 July 2025 (UTC)

Removing dead links is seldom useful. Even if no archived copies can be found, they are evidence that the information was verifiable at the time the information was added. In this case, the web.archive.org had an archived copy, and I have added an archived link and archive date to the citation.-- Toddy1 (talk) 06:06, 11 July 2025 (UTC)

Great, thank you. E^robson (T^alk) 06:22, 11 July 2025 (UTC)