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 | This page in a nutshell: The American right's war on reality-based sources is a pressing problem for Wikipedia. If you are here to "balance" sources we consider reliable with ideological sources you consider reliable but we do not, then the problem is not us, it's you. |
Sourcing. It's political. It shouldn't be, but it is.
The word fact gained its modern meaning alongside the growth of science out of the earlier field of natural philosophy. Over a period of a century or so, there was a shift from philosophical truth weighed by quality of rhetoric, to objective truth established by empirical measurement, and this latter became known as fact, from the legal term for "thing that was done", based on the Latin factum. Aristotle wrote that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, and this was accepted as truth by some schools of thought long after it had been conclusively demonstrated to be wrong. When you hear of "alternative facts", or see mainstream media dismissed as "fake news", that is what you are seeing: a rhetorical Truth™ asserted against an objective fact.
Wikipedia is a reality-based project. Where facts conflict with Truth™, we state facts as facts and describe Truths™ as beliefs. This is a foundational principle of the project. If you dislike it, you are almost certainly in the wrong place. Try Conservapedia or InfoGalactic.