Green ends by saying Wikipedia editors are “not trying to define reality” but trying to give people “a shared starting point.” That distinction matters because modern debates about truth often collapse into a fight over who gets total interpretive control.
But most social knowledge does not require a perfect final authority in order to be useful. It requires enough shared ground for disagreement to become intelligible. A common baseline of names, events, dates, sources, and summaries makes deeper argument possible without pretending that all argument is already settled.
This is a modest but essential vision of truthfulness. The goal of a public knowledge system is not to eliminate interpretation. The goal is to create enough common orientation that people are not arguing from separate universes.
Verbatim: “You’re just trying to give us all a shared starting point.”