While words like allegedly should be avoided it is even worse to word a proposition by it is Instead you should write like Who and who suggested that yck C Dorvaq thank you for the pointer where I see Newspapers for instance almost universally refer to any indicted but unconvicted criminal as an alleged criminal Agreed I use alleged whenever writing about someone where crimes have been charged but not yet proven in a court of law Perhaps what I m trying to ask is more of a common sense question to which the answer is so obvious that no one has thought to incorporate it in a policy or guideline here Trying again Once an accused criminal is convicted in a court of law is it not both inappropriate and biased to insist on using the word alleged when writing about the charges of which he s been convicted Maybe someone has a pointer to an old discussion or arbitration about this It seems that it must have come up in the past I m pretty sure there is no discussion involving the generic use of allege or any derivative thereof specific to before and after trials However there has been many discussions of this sort on individual article pages involving criminals But most of these discussions have been initiated by either anonymous users or users who contribute very little to Wikipedia besides the article in question Perhaps your best bet would to start there unless someone else can provide you with something more informative Anyhow I don t believe this needs to be incorporated into policy guideline beyond how the word has already been treated In terms of law to allege is to present without proof or without first proving Therefore to state the convicted crime of an offender as an allegation is inherently contradictory Wikipedia is dedicated to quality and integrity anything contradictory fails on those two points but that s my opinion talk Ah that last paragraph hits the nail on the head thanks Nothing like logic to prove a point I came upon the Megan Kanka article by chance and I remember the case quite well It really irked me after removing all the allegeds and cleaning up the article to find an old entry on the Talk page stating He argues that he was wrongfully convicted if he admitted to the allegations they wouldn t be alleged but he hasn t so therefore they re alleged and he s the alleged killer Arrgh Thanks again