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.