Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Raul654 (talk | contribs) at 22:06, 3 September 2005 (First draft of Kosebamse's law). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Raul's Laws of Misplaced Pages

1. Much of Misplaced Pages's content, and all of the day to day functions are overseen by a small core of the most dedicated contributors. These users are the most valuable resource Misplaced Pages has.

   Corollary - Of these highly dedicated users who have left, the vast majority left as a result of trolls, vandals, and/or POV warriors - typically not as a result of any one particular user, but from the combined stress of dealing with many of them. Consequently, such problem users should be viewed as Misplaced Pages's biggest handicap.

2. Content brings visitors - this is as true for Wikis as it is for networks, as dictated by Metcalf's law. Of those visitors, a certain number will stay and become contributors. Of those, a certain number of those will stay long enough to become dedicated users.
3. You cannot motivate people on a large scale to write about something they don't want to write about.

   Corollary - Getting people to do things in the real world is difficult. The difficulty increases in proportion to the deviation from normal activities that such work requires.

4. For every one person who knows something about copyright law, there are at least ten who don't, and two who think they do but don't.
5. Over time, contentious articles will grow from edit-war inspiring to eventually reach a compromise that is agreed upon by all involved editors. This equilibrium will inevitably be disturbed by new users who accuse the article of being absurdly one sided and who attempt to rewrite the entire article. This is the cyclical nature of controversial articles.
6. Misplaced Pages's steadily increasing popularity means that within the next year or two, we will begin to see organized corporate astroturfing campaigns.

   Prediction confirmed, August 28, 2005 (9 months after prediction was made) "One anonymous reader contacted Boingboing telling them he worked at a marketing company that uses Misplaced Pages for its online marketing strategies. 'That includes planting of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new promotional sites or 'leaks' embedded in entries to test diffusion of information. Misplaced Pages is just a more transparent version of Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it.'"

7. As time goes on, the rules and informal policies on Misplaced Pages tend to become less and less plastic and harder and harder to change.
8. Misplaced Pages has a disproportionately large number of gays, transgendered, and furries. The reason for this has yet to be satisfactorily explained, although it has been suggested by NullC that "all new mediums are first explored by the minorities and the marginalized".
9. Being on the Arbitration Committee is the most thankless job on Misplaced Pages. It is absolutely impossible to do it such that people are happy with you. If you are doing a bad job, people complain; if you are doing a good job, people don't notice (or sometimes even then complain). All of your actions are examined under a microscope. People expect you to be the Oracle of all truth - to work miracles no matter how complicated the case, no matter how how bad the evidence, no matter how hostile and stubborn the disputants. And of course, there are the accusations of cabalism.
10. For Misplaced Pages:Requests for adminship: People support on the basis of a good track record with no "bad" incidents. That is, they think someone is a good admin because of a lack of evidence that person is bad. So when asked why they think someone would be good admin, they have nothing specific to point at (merely a lack of bad behavior). On the other hand, when opposing someone, generally they oppose on the basis of one or a small number of incidents which exposed that nominees's judgement as questionable -- that is, they have a small set of incidents which they can point at affirmatively and say "these are why I oppose". As a result, oppose votes are much easier to explain than support votes.
    • Corollary - Because specific incidents constitute evidence against bad behavior, whereas it takes a long track record of good behavior to become an admin, in a given time it is possible to build up far more bad evidence than good evidence. This explains the RFA effect often deried as "people having long memories" - that for a given number of bad incidents, it takes a very long time to build up suffecient good behavior to counterbalance the bad.

Raul's coefficient is a measure of the amount of Misplaced Pages's average nonsense per edit over a given range of time.

Raul's coefficient (T₀, T₁) = Σ (nonsense of all edits to Misplaced Pages made between T₀ and T₁)/Σ (all edits to Misplaced Pages made between T₀ and T₁)

Laws by others

1. Silsor's law - the craziness of the editor is directly proportional to the number of adjectives in his/her edit summaries
   • Raul's corollary - It is also proportional to the number of exclamation points and capital letters.
   • David Gerard's corollary - Putting a "Full stop." "At the end of every edit summary." indicates an editor so anal they alphabetise their underwear. Treat gently
2. Slowking Man's law (Misplaced Pages's version of Godwin's law) - As a debate over user conduct or article content continues, the probability of one user accusing another of being a deletionist approaches one.
3. Netoholic's law - As a wiki discussion grows longer, the probability of an accusation by one user of another acting unilaterally approaches one.
4. Luigi30's law - Ego is directly proportional to edit count. Once ego becomes too large, it is very easily bruised.
5. The Futility Principle - In any Misplaced Pages discussion, the probability that some participant will belligerently threaten to appeal the matter to Jimbo is inversely proportional to the probability that Jimbo would actually intervene in that dispute. (-JamesMLane)
6. Adam Bishop's law - Anytime people organize together to present one POV, it's going to end up badly
7. Essjay's law - The frequency and fervor of any given user's insistence that a cabal exists is inversely proportional to the likelihood said user would be aware of the cabal if it existed.
8. Kosebamse's law - People of strong opinion are not blocked for having strong opinions, many are blocked for inappropriately using Misplaced Pages as a soapbox to advocate their beliefs.