Well it’s once again the end of August, with just enough time for one last Eponymy in August post for 2018. I’ve been saving this punchy one: today’s Eponymy is Cunningham’s Law. This is another Internet-native law, and it states,
“The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”
In other words, people who wouldn’t rise to the occasion to answer your question correctly are more likely instead to correct a person who is wrong, or fight against the spread of misinformation by shouting down wrong answers to questions.
A popular old post on bash.org [CW: slurs] explains this phenomenon perfectly.
Howard G. “Ward” Cunningham invented the wiki paradigm for collaborative editing of linked data, and its first implementation, WikiWikiWeb, in 1994. The original wiki still exists on the Web at c2.com (the company website for Ward’s consultancy Cunningham & Cunningham). He is a graudate of Purdue University, and has an impressive employment history culminating at his current [ed note: at the time of original publication] position at software analytics company New Relic. In addition to wikis, Cunningham is a leader in the fields of software design patterns and extreme programming (XP).
Former Intel exec Steven McGeady claimed that Cunningham coined his eponymous law in the 1980s based on interactions on the Internet (and beyond) message board system USENET, but Cunningham himself claims (in a Youtube video, no less) that he never suggested such a thing and was misquoted.