An Opinion is a stance you hold about what something means, what should be done, what matters, or what is likely true when the evidence is incomplete. Opinions are not automatically worthless, but they are not automatically valuable either. In a Living History project, opinions are treated as part of human reality, while also being kept structurally distinct from Evidence.
A helpful way to keep things clean is to separate three kinds of statements that people casually call “opinions”. A Value Judgement is about what ought to be the case. An Interpretation is about what a set of facts might mean. A Factual Claim is about what did happen in the shared world. In practice these get tangled, and that tangling is one of the main sources of conflict.
Douglas Adams has a sharp line on the status of opinion:
> All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others - wikiquote 
There is also a widely circulated quote that says “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” This is commonly attributed to Douglas Adams in casual circulation, but it is usually attributed to Harlan Ellison in quote collections and discussions, so in an evidence-first workflow it should be treated as an attribution problem until you have a primary source you trust - goodreads
In epistemology terms, an opinion becomes more than a vibe when it exposes its Reasons. Reasons can include evidence, logic, domain knowledge, and also disclosed values. The key is legibility: can another person see what would change your mind, or is your “opinion” functioning as identity armour.
This matters a lot in Rewilding History. We want to allow contradictions that are plausible differences of perception in Empathetic Narratives. But once a narrative asserts a factual claim that collides with another factual claim, the collision should be promoted into Hard History as an explicit contestation: linked sources, competing interpretations, and a clear separation between what is attested and what is inferred.
A practical rule is to treat opinions as welcome in the narrative ring and disciplined in the archive ring. Narratives can contain strong judgements, but they should hyperlink outward to the evidence they lean on, and they should label where they are speculating. The archive can contain disagreement, but it should disagreement-about-claims, not disagreement-about-identities.
The deeper ethic is not “stop having opinions”. The ethic is “earn your opinions”. This gives space for both creativity and fact, but in a manor in which both play well together. In a commons, that means grounding them where possible, labelling them where not, and keeping the door open for revision when better evidence arrives.
# See - Living History and Rewilding History - Evidence and Opinion - Evidence and Opinion - The Anarchive and Hard History - Perspective - Primary Source and Secondary Source - Inference, Underdetermination and Uncertainty - Bias