Vusi Dlamini

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Reformulated:

• "Truth" is not the only criteria for inclusion, verifiability is also required.
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• Reliable sources typically include: articles from magazines or newspapers (particularly scholarly journals), or books by recognized authors (basically, books by respected publishers). Online versions of these are usually accepted, provided they're held to the same standards. User generated sources (like Wikipedia) are to be avoided. Self-published sources should be avoided except for information by and about the subject that is not self-serving (for example, citing a company's website to establish something like year of establishment).
• Articles are to be written from a neutral point of view. Wikipedia is not concerned with facts or opinions, it just summarizes reliable sources. Real scholarship actually does not say what understanding of the world is "true," but only with what there is evidence for. In the case of science, this evidence must ultimately start with physical evidence. In the case of religion, this means only reporting what has been written and not taking any stance on doctrine.
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Also, not a policy or guideline, but something important to understand the above policies and guidelines: Wikipedia operates off of objective information, which is information that multiple persons can examine and agree upon. It does not include subjective information, which only an individual can know from an "inner" or personal experience. Most religious beliefs fall under subjective information. Wikipedia may document objective statements about notable subjective claims (i.e. "Christians believe Jesus is divine"), but it does not pretend that subjective statements are objective, and will expose false statements masquerading as subjective beliefs (cf. Indigo children).

You may also want to read User:Ian.thomson/ChristianityAndNPOV. We at Wikipedia are highbrow (snobby), heavily biased for the academia.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. All we do here is cite, summarize, and paraphrase professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources, without addition, nor commentary. We're not a directory, nor a forum, nor a place for you to "spread the word".

If you are here to promote pseudoscience, extremism, fundamentalism or conspiracy theories, we're not interested in what you have to say. Tgeorgescu (talk) 28 September 2020 10:18:56 (UTC)

References

About your commentary to Fact

Hi, friend. There are many, many misunderstandings in your commentary. Answers in order of appearance: evidence is what one uses to establish the truth of a proposition. The evidence itself is not what's primarily under evaluation. Then, you confound the ontic with the epistemic. Truth is semantic, facts are ontic. This means that if a city existed, that is a fact. The existence of the city is not true, facts cannot be true or false, because truth is predicated only of semantical entities, such as propositions, sentences, claims, utterances, etc. What would be true would be the proposition claiming that the city existed. But the past existence of the city would be a fact. It doesn't matter if archeologists never found out. One thing is for something to be a fact, and a different matter is for it to be accepted as fact (again, the ontic and the epistemic). Facts are not dependent on perception. In a nutshell, yes, the first sentence is correct, and a definition given by one of the greatest philosophers who have studied these matters. --ExperiencedArticleFixer (talk) 02:12, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

You are simply still confusing claims (propositions) with facts. Writing words in all caps doesn’t make your ideas better. An establishment of a proposition as expressing a fact is what can be mistaken. Facts of course change, but the fact that something happened the way it did doesn’t change. You are still misunderstanding what a fact is. You are talking about scientific-facts, not about facts. In your example, what (allegedly) changed was an established scientific belief, a scientific-fact, not a fact. But there is no point in repeating myself if you don’t understand what you have called the “big words”. If you want to understand what I’m telling you, you need to understand the difference between states of affairs and claims about states of affairs. Your idea that truth doesn’t change is well guided, but only claims, not states of affairs, are true. You say that “sometimes the established facts are not true”, well, facts are never true, it is claims that are true or false. Saying that a fact is true is committing a category error, like saying that the number 3 is green. You just need to apply your idea of unchanging truth to states of affairs and you will get what a fact is: the actual state of affairs, which doesn’t change when our beliefs change. Your ideas are OK, but you are conflating the meanings of some words and you need more philosophical refining, as you are failing to differentiate the ontic from the epistemic. Cheers. --ExperiencedArticleFixer (talk) 16:18, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I see you are categorising facts e.g. Scientific facts? So maybe there are Historic facts, Social facts, psychological facts, Religious facts etc? But you are trying to explain some form of other fact that "cannot be true or false"? Well, yes, I am confused by your argument. I don't see any logic in it.

The first line of the article reads: "A fact is an occurrence in the real world" which is some of what I disputed in the first place.

Now you write: "Facts of course change"! Which is what I have been saying!

Example: It's a FACT that both the above statements have been written and nothing will change that; but only, for as long as this page exists as EVIDENCE - It is both TRUE and a FACT i.e. a TRUE FACT. Once this page disappears, there will be no more EVIDENCE; and for those who never saw the page, it may no longer be a FACT; but it will always be TRUE despite them not knowing.

The OCCURRENCE cannot be UNOCCURRED; yet the FACT may disappear with the disappearance of the EVIDENCE. It is therefore wrong to equate FACT to OCCURRENCE. OCCURRENCE rather equates to TRUTH - they both never get undone; because OCCURRENCES can't be undone for as long as time travelling remains impossible.

So all I see in your argument is a belief in this "great Philosopher". I believe there's still room to be a greater, or even the greatest Philosopher. Who knew Einstein could greatly improve on Newton's work? Vusi Dlamini (talk) 00:46, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

First, usually in English scientific-facts are not the facts studied in the sciences, but the beliefs hold in them. Yes, facts cannot be true or false. This is one of the first things you need to understand. The fact that my dog is cute is not true, it just is, it is only my saying so that can be true or false. This is standard philosophy, so if you don’t understand it, google the difference between ontic and epistemic, and then google “semantic”. The fact that the above statements have been written will continue to be a fact even if the page doesn’t exist any more. Even if there is no evidence. That’s what “fact” means in English. If you don’t agree with that, you are using a different language. And I stopped reading because it is evident that you are defining terms in an unorthodox way. Words in all uppercase are considered rude on the Internet. Cheers. --ExperiencedArticleFixer (talk) 11:02, 25 January 2021 (UTC)