I don't think you can separate them so easily. People make mistakes. They make assumptions. They lack information. That shouldn't make them ineligible to participate in the debate, because the debate is the process by which those mistakes and assumptions get corrected and people arrive at a consensus. If they just shut up, they'll still be wrong, but then no one will correct them, and no one with the same wrong assumptions will see the correction.

And they're not always wrong.