Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 3/Who is the best football player of all time

I have a question for you: Who is the best football player of all time? Could you write in the chat? There we go. We have some answers: "Messi". "Maradona". "Not hard. Ronaldo." "Pelé". "we need sources". "It depends". "According to FIFA it's Messi". Yeah. So, interestingly, whereas in the exercise about the singer, you all agreed number two was the text from Wikipedia - you had absolutely no doubt - here we actually hear different opinions! By the way, each of them very confident! Someone said it's easy. Easy or not, the fact is you disagree with each other about who the best football player of all time is.

What is Wikipedia's answer? What would Wikipedia say to the question "who is the best football player of all time"? Maybe you have an idea in the chat? "To say who is the best player you can have a table where you have many periods, where we have the best player of each period and the sources." What else do we have on the chat? "Wikipedia does not take sides." "Wikipedia will give the best in each period, with sources." "Wikipedia will probably say 'according to this source: ...'". Yes. Very good.

So the short answer is that, if you ask *me*, Pelé is the greatest of all time. But nobody should care what my opinion is. *Wikipedia* doesn't have an opinion on this question of "who is the greatest football player of all time". It's an UN-ENCYCLOPEDIC question. An unencyclopedic question, which means Wikipedia will *never* have an answer to this question. Wikipedia should *never* say "X is the greatest football player of all time".

So does that mean we just can't describe the greatness of football players on Wikipedia at all? Does it mean we have to just say "this guy is a football player and this other guy is also a football player" and that's it, we cannot give any indication of their greatness? The answer is that Wikipedia's voice should never assert that someone or something is the *best*, or the *worst*, or any other *subjective judgments*.

What we *can* say is, for example, that this player scored the greatest number of goals at the FIFA World Cup, because that is an objective, measurable fact. That we can say, Wikipedia can say that. Wikipedia can have a table of the highest scorers at the FIFA World Cup. Wikipedia can say "Greenland is the largest island on Earth", because that is a measurable fact. So Wikipedia can say that something is "the largest", when it's measurable. But "who is the greatest football player?" is a question of judgment. It's a *subjective* question, and it's not a question of *fact*.