Project:Evidence

Evidence is the available body of information which might indicate the veracity of a claim, and it's strangely hard to get right without the big support system the scientific community uses to double and triple check experimental data. This presents a remarkably simple, but incredibly important question: Who's right? {{{body|

How is that a question?
Hopefully the dilemma now is clear if it wasn't already: Anyone can be right, and you might be wrong because of some bias. The answer, or at least a good compromise, comes from how one even defines "evidence". The beginning of this essay had a basic definition, but what does that entail? Who decides how convincing the "body of information" is towards any of the interpretations? Is it scientists, perfectly fallible humans who have historically been wrong as a collective and don't necessarily have a belief about what's being questioned? Is it a vague collective of "people" more intelligent than you, or a democratic vote about what's actually the correct way to think? Or is it that the very notion that evidence is in some way "objective" about what it proves is shaky at best, and the best possible meta interpretation is that evidence is a relativistic concept requiring each individual to decide for themselves?

Relevance to para.wiki
This compromise is what drives para.wiki. With so many conflicting ideas on what the details and explanations of the paranormal are, to include if the phenomena exist at all, some way to determine which is the "right" one necessarily must exist. However, rather than go through the tediousness and controversy of arbitrarily deciding who's right in the face of wildly incomplete information, it was decided that all theories should be treated with equal respect. Any given theory is assumed to be true within the context of itself, and doesn't presume that the readers themselves necessarily believe them.

So to clarify; when writing an article, you aren't trying to represent absolute truth, as you might find on wikis with the blessing of generally accepted evidence like Wikipedia. You're trying to present the evidence that exists for a belief to at best convince the reader of its veracity. Whether or not anything in this wiki is true is entirely dependent on the individual actually reading it. And yes, this includes the skeptical interpretations as well. }}}