Reading this Q, it uses the term "evolutionists".
I'm guessing it's a reverse of "creationists", but I haven't heard that term before, and it sounds somewhere between mildly insulting and very imprecise to me.
Should it be edited to something "better" and if so to what? Or just left to stand as a valid term in the evolution/creationism discourse that I just happened to have never heard before?
I think you (and RationalWiki) are being too sensitive.
The term "evolutionist" has a reasonable dictionary definition. It doesn't, to my ears, contain any inaccurate or slanderous content.
It is a big step up from the alternative "Darwinist" (which implies the theory hasn't been developed since the works of Darwin).
I am aware that words that sound innocent may be imbued with negative meaning - c.f. the way words for minorities, including the disabled, morph over time as each variant is adopted as a slur and rejected. Evolutionist doesn't (yet?) have such a connotation to me.
Simply calling proponents of evolution "biologists" or "scientists" is begging the question. If the argument is that biology is divided over evolution and creationism, then evidence needs to be provided that virtually every biologist accepts evolution. (e.g. Project Steve) It isn't enough to simply declare that scientists accept evolution.
If Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, PZ Myers and Niles Eldredge call themselves evolutionists [Ref: RationalWiki), I think Skeptics.SE questioners may too.
It's a term commonly used by creationists, so it is expected to show up in creationist claims and we should leave it in any quotes where it appears.
It is a term we should generally avoid according to our neutrality principle, as scientists would not label themselves this way.
For the record I've nuked it from the question body (not the cite) for two very simple reasons:
It was part of a problematic sentence: "Did life happen by chance, as claimed by evolutionists?". Scientists, or "evolutionists", don't necessarily claim that. The statement was begging its own answer.
Removing it didn't make the question any worse, the term was imprecise at best, offensive at worst. While I do believe in the best intentions of who wrote it, it costs nothing to fix it and doing so makes the question better.
