I'm not an editor or anything of the like. I'm not a published author (though I say my prayers at night...). I'm not an English teacher. I'm not an E2 god.
I'm just a user of this wonderfully rich metabase and I, for one, find fiction to be absolutely necessary- as equally so as non-fiction. I, like CapnTrippy, believe, however, that the fiction posted here on E2 should have some merit to it. It is possible to write facts within fiction. Most sci-fi writers make their careers off of doing so. Stephenson, Asimov, Gibson, Heinlein, Ellison, Heller... the greatest sci-fi authors of this century managed to do it. I'm trying, slowly but surely. The real nit to pick here, though, isn't whether science is showcased in fiction, but whether facts are evident.
E2 is rife with facts. That's a no-brainer. Fiction puts those facts into a certain sort of context. Historical fiction, medical fiction, military fiction, dramatic fiction, psychological fiction... there are other types of fact-based fiction than just sci-fi. Setting fictitious characters around actual events can help to give more meaning to those events. Setting a fictitious story or backdrop to a factual discovery can lend credence to that discovery (and its possiblities).
E2 is more than just a dictionary or encyclopedia. If that's what we wanted, we'd all have memberships to Britannica.Com or Webster.Com. E2, on top of its factual foundation, is a community. In every community you will find artisans and craftspeople- especially storytellers. They give the knowledge of civilization life and a certain robust sense of possibility that hard, cold, intellectual facts don't. They, the storytellers, offer their audience's minds new ways to explore things found in non-fiction.
Don't discount the wonderful things that fiction can offer. If you see a story that might have some interest and factual information in it, upvote it, for it does indeed have factual content. Dreams with meanings are not diversions; they are signs of things to come. And, whether you choose to believe it or not, the future is a fact. Without fiction, many things that we know to be fact wouldn't exist:
Cell phone = adaptation of the handheld communicator of Star Trek.
Lunar landings = "foretold" as a potential reality by whatshisname, oh yeah, Robert Heinlein.
Submarines = ever read Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"?
There's tons more. Verily, there is more fact in fiction and the inverse cannot be true.