[Wikipedia-l] Re: Educating newcomers

Sat Nov 23 18:55:11 UTC 2002

Larry Sanger wrote:

>What's "unhelpful" about it?  I find unexplained and unfair criticisms
>unhelpful.  Suppose the text said instead, as you say here, "Mars is a
>massive object that orbits the Sun." That's something that virtually
>everyone now agrees upon; therefore, according to the definition in the
>text it is a "fact" (something that we would all acknowledge to be fact,
>rather than opinion).  What difference does it make that it was not a
>"fact," in this sense, five hundred years ago?  The text explicitly
>acknowledges that "facts" can actually be falsehoods and "opinions" can be
>true, and that "facts" can change.  Is there something *wrong* with that
>state of affairs, and do you think there's anything we can do about it?
>
>It has never been and certainly is not a *fact*, by the definition given
>on the page, that God exists.  The text actually explicitly uses that
>proposition as a prime example of an opinion.
>
I think you have a philosophic way of looking at this that other 
wikipedians may not share.
I would be inclined to say "Mars is a planet" has *always* been a fact 
-- though at one time it was not *known*.
If next year we discover that Mars is made of green cheese, then that 
too will have always been a fact -- and things that we currently hold as 
facts about Mars will be shown to be wrong.

(though that's the mathematician side of me -- things are still true 
even when you're not looking at them ;-) -- I do see Larry's point, just 
trying to highlight possible communication problems.

I think NPOV is sometimes abused, when articles on controversial topics 
degenerate into a list of every single possible opinion, with things 
like "Christian views on X" spiralling off.

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