About the project

Facts have a history.

Not a Fact Anymore documents claims that institutions, researchers, and expert communities once had reason to treat as factual, and what happened when stronger evidence changed the picture.

The core catalogue currently contains 297 corrected, narrowed, superseded, reclassified, or overturned claims. A separate Institutional Beliefs collection follows cases in which factual propositions became embedded in policy, medicine, law, professional practice, education, or other institutions before being corrected or disconfirmed.

The site also tracks when claims changed and how long they remained defensible. Its 133-term glossary explains specialized concepts, while timelines, lifespan analysis, and category pages offer different ways of exploring the core catalogue. Institutional Beliefs is a related but separate collection with a stricter inclusion test.

The purpose is not to ridicule earlier researchers or generations. Many discarded ideas were reasonable given the evidence and instruments available at the time. Revising a conclusion when better evidence arrives is one of the strengths of science, scholarship, and empirical inquiry.

This is a curated, open-source project. Every published claim is sourced, dates and boundaries are treated as approximations where the history demands it, and proposed entries and corrections are reviewed before publication. The Institutional Beliefs collection currently contains 100 documented cases.