Where Fact Ends and Opinion Begins
There is a lot of noise why the founder of Wikipedia, or co-founder, or face of the organisation, does not seem to live up to the principles of the project itself. His Wikipedia page calls him the co-founder. In interviews, he calls himself the founder. People act as if they have caught him in a contradiction, as if the whole thing can be solved by a simple label.
Because it led me to the deeper question: What is even a fact in our world? What do we think a fact is? And why do we still pretend the borders are as clear as a schoolbook diagram?
In the textbooks, facts and opinions sit in two clean columns. A fact is something that can be verified. An opinion is something that expresses a view. It looks simple on the page. It never survives contact with reality.
Reality is messy. Reality is jelly. If you press your finger into it, the surface wobbles. It moves. It shifts. Even the most solid things have a soft underside. The moment a human life enters the picture, the lines blur.
Take the founder question: What does founder even mean? Is it the person with the first idea? The person who wrote the early code? The person who did the work? The person who kept the ship afloat? The person who became the public face?
This is not physics. It is not a measurement. It is a tangle of memory, effort, identity and history. Everyone involved tells the story from a different angle. All of them are describing something true. None of them are describing the whole truth.
The interviewer treated a complex biographical question as if it were a checkbox on a form. Jimmy Wales: Founder or co-founder? Black or white? The moment he the interviewer that, the conversation collapsed before it even started. Because he was not asking for a fact. He was asking for a confession. He wanted a controversy he could turn into clicks, attention and money.
We act as if facts and opinions come from different worlds. As if facts are steel and opinions are vapour. In truth they are two textures of the same thing. Most facts carry interpretation. Most opinions carry pieces of truth. The divide is convenient, not real.
The real question is not what a fact is, it is how we handle the wobble.
How we stay honest when the world does not behave like a spreadsheet. How we talk to each other when the categories break down. How we resist the temptation to turn every grey zone into a courtroom.
Often there is no pure fact. Not just opinion either. Just complexity, only degrees of clarity and degrees of distortion. The rest is jelly. And if we want to live in the real world, we have to learn how to think with it instead of pretending it is stone.
Last thought: Jelly is also delicious. The mess is not just a problem to solve. It is the medium we taste the world through. If we turn it into stone, we starve.