The correct truth is to go to a higher level of abstraction and explain that there's a naming controversy.
I get the general point, but I disagree that you have to choose between one of the possibilities instead of explaining what the current state of belief is. This won't eliminate grey areas but it'll sure get us closer than picking a side at random.
In all those cases, you can explain the existing sides and show the available evidence for each. This isn't perfect, but those cases don't show the imperfections clearly enough.
You have to look at the details before you find the grey areas. Consider the case of abortion, and further consider the question of the existence of the human soul. There's no scientific evidence for souls, but the decision to look only at scientific evidence is itself a bias towards a certain way of understanding the world.
This is still much better than just deciding to pick one or the other side and ignoring the dispute.
I don't see those examples as being either-or.
They don't seem like questions about any kind of objective truth, just questions about what aspect of a thing you think is the most important to you.
If the US government calls it one thing and everyone else calls it another, that's a dispute. I'm Australian. It is called the gulf of Mexico here. I still acknowledge that there is now a naming dispute between the US and basically everyone else.
The exact word "controversy" might have been the wrong choice by me, but whatever, I'm not a Wikipedia editor and I don't run Google Maps. The world has standards for dealing with government disputes and with i8n.
> If the US government calls it one thing and everyone else calls it another, that's a dispute
I guess that's the fundamental disagreement, I wouldn't call that a "dispute" more than I would call the name "America" a dispute, it's just that different people understand it different. For some, it means a group of continents (that's how most people around me would take that for example), for others it means a country in North America (which I'm guessing is the common meaning if you live in North America already). Just because different people has different meanings doesn't make it into a dispute.
I get the general point, but I disagree that you have to choose between one of the possibilities instead of explaining what the current state of belief is. This won't eliminate grey areas but it'll sure get us closer than picking a side at random.