On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 1:27 PM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
2008/11/13 Jay Litwyn brewhaha@edmc.net:
Since I believe in global warming and I see a contest between it and economics, I see a very hot dispute that really should be off-loaded.
There
are so many other places for volatile information to go. In other words,
if
someone did [[global warming]], I think they should expect to end up on another site, unless the article is restricted to history.
I think this is going to end in tears - where do we draw the line? Do we just not talk about global warming; do we talk about it as something that is believed to have happened up to and including last week; do we talk about it and imply it may continue to happen; do we talk about it in general terms in the future but give no numbers?
I'm not sure this approach is helpful; it tries to deal with a small set of specific (percieved) problems by applying a draconian general rule. I mean, take cosmology. We'd be a shoddy encyclopedia if we didn't talk about the [[heat death of the universe]], a very well-known concept... but it's entirely hypothetical, it exists as a paper theory with some substantiating numbers, and it's several billion years ahead.
Talking about the future is fine, as long as it is grounded in reliable sources in the present. I think the original intent of WP:CRYSTAL was to avoid original research and to avoid articles about future events becoming too disconnected from the present and becoming "in-universe" (to borrow a phrase from the debates about articles on fictional topics). In other words, having an article about a future scenario, or an alternate history, or an alternate reality, or a fictional topic, should always be securely grounded in what people have said in the past and are saying now.
Carcharoth