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It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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Raul's Laws of Wikipedia

Much of Wikipedia'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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia's biggest handicap.

Counterpoint – Content may be overseen by a core group but contributed by a larger, more anonymous set.[1]
Content brings visitors – this is as true for Wikis as it is for networks, as dictated by Metcalfe'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.
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.
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.
Truthanado's conundrum. Does anyone really understand copyright law?
Over time, contentious articles will grow from edit-war inspiring to eventually reach a compromise that is agreed upon by all the editors who have not departed in exasperation. 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.
Wikipedia'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 Wikipedia 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. Wikipedia is just a more transparent version of [online meeting place] Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it.'"
As time goes on, the rules and informal policies on Wikipedia tend to become less and less plastic and harder and harder to change.
Wikipedia 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 media are first explored by the minorities and the marginalized".
Being on the Arbitration Committee is the most thankless job on Wikipedia. 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 bad the evidence, no matter how hostile and stubborn the disputants. And of course, there are the accusations of cabalism.
For Wikipedia: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 judgment 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 of 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 derided as "people having long memories" – that for a given number of bad incidents, it takes a very long time to build up sufficient good behavior to counterbalance the bad.
  - "It is easy to go down to hell; Night and Day the Gates of Dark Death stand wide; But to climb back up again, to retrace ones steps to the open air, there lies the problem, the difficult task." – Virgil: The Aeneid
The people who complain loudest about the Arbitration Committee are the ones who have been sanctioned by the Committee for their misbehavior. By the same token, the users who most zealously advocate changing Wikipedia's rules are the users who refuse to obey the rules as they currently exist.
JamesBWatson' First Law: If you tag an article as 'non-notable' there is a fifty percent chance that the writer will leave a message on the talk page explaining that the subject of the article is little known, and that Wikipedia is the one chance of changing that.
Wikipedia is not a forum for Arbitration. The Arbitration Committee exists to help the encyclopedia, not the other way around. All Arbitration Committee decisions involve some sort of cost-benefit analysis. Users who have a history of improving the encyclopedia can expect more consideration than those who do not.
sannse's caveat – However, good behaviour does not in itself excuse bad behavior.
Raul's Razor – An article is neutral if, after reading it, you cannot tell where the author's sympathies lie.
Given a communication forum with a sufficiently high concentration of trolls, the trolls will do a superb job of discrediting themselves.
The cabalness of a user is directly proportional to the number of private Wiki{p/m}edia mailing lists (s)he is subscribed to.
While there are many Wikipedia articles that lack a free picture, there are always plentiful illustrations for our articles on sex and anatomy (See also: commons:Template:Nopenis)

Wikipedia law of complaints: "The volunteer secretary at my first church used to receive a lot of complaints about things; the bulletin print was too small, too large, too fancy, too plain, the church newsletter came on Tuesday and was thrown out because Tuesday is 'junk mail day' and it was overlooked, the new letterhead was too white, too ivory, too expensive. Then, one day, I heard her tell a member: 'Please feel free to tell me everything you don't like about things. Do, however, be prepared for the fact that doing so will make it your job; if you don't like the way I do it, you can do it. Now, what was it that was the problem?'" – Sent to Raul654 by a user who shall remain anonymous

Laws by others

0. The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.

Redwolf24's corollary – Therefore Wikipedia really is Communism.
- Zginder's Zeroth counter-corollary – Therefore Wikipedia is the opposite of Communism, as communism works in theory, but never in practice.
Zginder's Zeroth corollary – Therefore it is impossible to predict when Wikipedia will stop functioning.
Ostrom's Law states the opposite: theory can be fixed.

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.
  - Dan's sub-corollary – And to the percent of bold and/or colored text in his talk page comments.
    - Anon's sub-sub-corollary – And also proportional to the number of characters in his/her signature.
    - RyanGerbil10's observation – No quality edit has ever been summarized IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.
      - Firefoxman's observation – I'm pretty sure that has occured. Case in point. (weird, I don't think I read Joel's comment when I wrote the title for the URL...)
        Leo Johannes (talk)'s observation – If a good edit has been made with an edit comment in all caps letters, then probably it was a mistake.
- David Gerard's corollary – Putting a "Full stop." "At the end of every edit summary." indicates an editor so anal they alphabetise their underwear.
  - Joel's comment – A case in point (sorry Johnny :p).
Slowking Man's law (Wikipedia'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.
- Jfdwolff's corollary – The longer an AFD page, the higher the probability that the original poster will be accused of censorship.[2]
  - Daniel's sub-corollary – In addition, the longer an AFD page, the higher the probability that the article in question will be kept.
    - Zginder's sub-sub-corollary The longer the AFD lasts the higher the probability that the article in question will be kept.
- Dysprosia's law (Alternate version of Godwin's law) – As a debate over anything related to Wikipedia continues, the probability of one user asking for Jimbo Wales's intervention approaches 1.
- Goatsewin's Law: As the number of edits on a wiki page increases, the probability of a Goa Tse being placed at the top approaches one.
- Risker's Law: As the number of contributors to an AfD or RfA increases, the probability of an accusation of meatpuppetry converges in probability to 1.
  - Avi's corollary: More often than not, the accusation will include JayJg's e-mail to enwiki-l.
Netoholic's law – As a wiki discussion grows longer, the probability of an accusation by one user of another acting unilaterally approaches one. [3]
Luigi30's law – Ego is directly proportional to edit count. Once ego becomes too large, it is very easily bruised.
Bots don't have an ego..... ;)
Bot owners have egos, though...
JamesMLane's Futility Principle – In any Wikipedia 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.
Adam Bishop's law – Anytime people organize together to present one POV, it's going to end up badly
Essjay's first 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.
- User:Hiding's corollary: The likelihood of a cabal existing is inversely proportional to the number of people alleging its existence.
Essjay's second law – Wikipedia has no right to free speech. The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law..."; we are not Congress, we are the cabal. [4]
Essjay's third law – The first person to demand the unilateral desysopping of the admin they are complaining about loses. Always.
Dino's Corollary: Unless the first person to demand the unilateral desysopping of the admin they are complaining about is named Jimmy Wales. Then the admin loses. Always.

llywrch's observation – No matter how clued or respected a user is, mistakes can recoil causing that user great damage. It's always best to 'fess up to your mistakes and take your lumps as soon as possible.
Kosebamse's law – People of strong opinion are not banned or blocked for promoting strong opinions. Eventually, they are banned or blocked for violating social standards in the attempt to defend their views.
- Corollary: The exoticness of an idea is inversely correlated to its proponent's respect for social norms.
UninvitedCompany's law: Wikipedia's growth is limited by the number of people who are willing to organize facts, check references, research questionable assertions, and deal with community issues. An overwillingness on the community's part to indulge uncivil contributors risks alienating this group. [5]
Jacqui's law: the longer a user spends time in polls and/or debates, the more he or she will see each question as a binary of delete or keep.
- Jeff G.'s first corollary: sometimes, the binary is of oppose or support.
brian0918's law: The larger Wikipedia becomes, the more emphasis will be placed on voting to make decisions.
David Gerard's law – On Wikipedia, the reward for a job well done is another three jobs.
- Truthanado's Corollary to David Gerard's law: It's not limited to Wikipedia.
  - Indeed – it applies to any volunteer organisation – David Gerard (talk) 18:56, 4 April 2010 (UTC)
Mindspillage's law: As the length of an argument on wikipedia-l or foundation-l approaches infinity, the probability of it turning into a language debate approaches 1.
SigPig's Godwinized Corollary: Once the language debate has commenced, the odds are 2ⁿ:1 (where n is the number of comments currently entered in the debate) that a user will accuse another user of linguistic imperialism.
Johnleemk's first law: In a dispute, the higher the probability that a user is in the wrong, the higher the probability that that user will take an immediatist stance in said dispute. The reason for this is that users who are in the wrong, whether from a policy or civility standpoint, tend to fear people will figure this out and thus desire to have their suggestions effected immediately.
- Corollary: As the ratio of one side's immediatism quotient (a measure of immediatism) to the other's immediatism quotient approaches 1, the higher the probability that both sides are in the wrong.
I thought immediatism was measured by immedi-chlorians...--Here T oHelp 13:32, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Johnleemk's second law: As the number of registered users approaches infinity, the probability of coming across an ignorant editor, troll or someone acting in bad faith approaches 1.
Johnleemk's third law: As the amount of policies and guidelines increases, so does the opportunity to game them.
- Charles Matthews' law: The wikilawyers and trolls always want a codified set of rules on an issue, so they can subvert the spirit while adhering to the letter. [6]
Redwolf24's law: The amount of vandalism an article receives is directly proportional to the amount of readers it gets, which is proportional to how fast the vandalism will get reverted. Thus, on pages where vandalism lasts for a long time, the topic isn't a terribly interesting one, and it's often likely no one's viewed the article in between the vandalism and the revert.
- Od Mishehu's corollary: The length of time that vandalism remains in an article is negatively correlated with the number of readers who saw the vandalized version.
Lubaf's law: Sanity is in finite supply on Wikipedia; thus, the more contributors exist, the more likely any given user is insane.
- Chrisd87's corollary: The sum total of the sanity on wikipedia is approximately constant; the population is growing.
- Pafferguy's corollary: Therefore, as the number of rules in this list increases, the higher the probability that the rules in this list are insane.
Rob Church's first law: There is no smoke without fire. There is no cry of unilateralism without an action rooted in common sense.
Geogre's law: Any biographical article with a minuscule last name is already in trouble.
- Kwsn's Corollary: more so if the first letter of the last name isn't capitalized.
  - Doradus's Reiteration: even more so if the last name is in lowercase.
Extreme Unction's first law: If enough people act independently towards the same goal, the end result is indistinguishable from a conspiracy.
- Corollary: In any sufficiently large social endeavor, there will always be some subset of people who fail to understand this, and who will see conspiracies and cabals around every corner whenever their views fall into the minority.
- Corollary: As the number of people who independently conclude that someone is a disruptive jerk increases, the likelihood of that person actually being a positive, constructive contributor who's merely run afoul of the "ruling elite" decreases. Not that there was ever a big chance of that to begin with.
- Corollary: The people who most need to understand this law and its corollaries never will.
Extreme Unction's second law: No matter how patently ludicrous a given proposition may be, any sufficiently large online community will always have at least one person willing to defend that proposition.
- EWS23's corollary: Similarly, no matter how brilliant or perfect a given proposition may be, at least one person will oppose that proposition.
Grammy's law: If a user posts on User talk:Jimbo Wales about a dispute, that is a strong indication that the user in question is a) inexperienced or b) wrong.
- Corollary: If a user starts coloring his posts in discussions, that is an indication that the user is going to post on User talk:Jimbo Wales soon. (See also James M Lane's principle above).
Carbonite's law: The more a given user invokes Assume good faith as a defense, the lower the probability that said user was acting in good faith. (see also: WP:AAGF)
Radiant's law: No matter how serious a discussion or how well-founded the arguments, there will always be someone who misses the point and seeks to discount all of it by invoking a one-liner meme in response, such as "instruction creep", "voting is evil" or "adminship is no big deal".
NicholasTurnbull's law: As the number of miscreants one successfully deals with as an admin increases into infinity, the probability of an RfC being filed against you approaches 1.
This is actually a very weak statement. For it not to be true the probability of the n-th miscreant, p(n), taking you to RfC would have to decrease very rapidly (1/n^x for some x>2?) as n increases. This is clearly absurd, so the law holds. But it is very weak. Suggest a rephrasing. Pcb21 Pete 00:10, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
I would suggest that, given Metcalfe's law, this can be further refined to say that, the more miscreants one deals with, the more likely these miscreants are to find other miscreants similarly dealt with, and thus the odds of having an RfC filded are somehow related to m(m-1)/2... but I'll leave the finer mathematic points of miscreant networking to someone with more knowhow in the field. JDoorj a m Talk 19:15, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
Snowspinner's law: All methods of dispute resolution, given time, will trend towards becoming useless or becoming the arbcom.
Deckiller's First Law: If treated fairly, some vandals will flock back to Wikipedia and eventually become respected contributors.
- J.Steinbock's Corollary: Similarly, if treated unfairly, various respected contributors will degrade themselves with vandalish behavior.
Deckiller's Second Law: The amount of fancruft articles on Wikipedia is equal to the amount of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
- darkprincealain's Corollary (Adapted from a famous Einstein quote): The difference between articles that contain vanispamcruftisement and articles worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia is that the number of articles worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia is finite.
Alhutch's law: Editing Wikipedia is a privilege, not a right. [7]
Demi's law: "There are only two kinds of actions that can be taken on a wiki: those that can be described as unilateral and those that can be described as supporting a cabal."
Ryan's law: "All change, no matter how insignificant, unthreatening, or wholly beneficial, will generate controversy from somewhere."
Palm dogg's law – According to the WikiProphet, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to write a good NPOV article on Islam. [8]
HereToHelp's corollary: It is also easier for a needle to pass through the eye of a camel with neither the camel nor animal rights groups complaining than to write a good NPOV article on Islam.
Zero and Tony Sidaway's law: The encyclopedia comes first. Always. [9]
Rob Church's second law: Some people are only alive because it's against the law to kill them. Some people are only able to edit Wikipedia because it's against the "rules" to block them.
Philwelch's Law of Article Quality: All other factors held equal, the greater the notability and encyclopedic merit of a given subject on Wikipedia, the higher quality the related article.
Geogre's Law: Wikipedia is not the venue for negotiating ultimate truth nor the secret history of the world. They have Usenet for that.
Extreme Unction's corollary: Wikipedia is the Second Coming of Usenet.
Running a large wiki is like cooking a small fish. Adapted from the Tao by Septentrionalis 20:26, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
Alphax's first law: The longer you know an editor, the more likely it is that they will turn out to be a dick.
Kbdank71's corollary: The longer you know an editor you like, the more likely it is that they will leave the project for good.
Alphax's second law: As the number of banned users increases, the probability that any given troublemaker is a sockpuppet of one of these banned users approaches 1.
the wub's first law: The impossible holy grail of Wikipedia policy is a complete definition of common sense. It follows that anything less is flawed by comparison.
the wub's second law: Wikipedia is not a democracy, a bureaucracy or an anarchy, but draws elements and characteristics from these and other systems when it benefits the encyclopedia to do so.
the wub's third law: Respect for others is more important than respect for the rules.
Bhadani's First Law: The truth does not depend on a consensus of opinion.
Corollary: Truth without consensus is opinion, unless you're an all-knowing god or Jimbo Wales. Dkriegls 08:03, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
HereToHelp's First Law: The probability that any new user with "wheel" or "communism" in their name will be blocked on sight is very close to 1. Whether or not they would turn out to be vandals or priceless contributors is uncorrelated.
HereToHelp's Second Law: Albert Einstein said: "The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." Such, "The difference between a good contributing admin and a vandal is that the admins have their limits."
HereToHelp's Third Law: The following things are all inversely related: the probability of someone threatening to complain to Jimbo over a heated issue and the probability of whether they actually do, the probability of them threatening and the probability that Jimbo will react positively, the probability that Jimbo will react positively and the probability that he will intervene, the probability that a user will threaten to tell Jimbo and the probability that he will intervene, and the probability that a user will not threaten to tell Jimbo about a dispute and the probability that he will intervene. (The probability that any law of Wikipedia will make sense mathematically is 0.)
HereTohelp's Fourth Law: The length of time an editor has been around and the amount of contributions to articles they make are inversely proportional.
Corollary: Articles are grunt work.
HereToHelp's Fifth Law: Wikipedia users have way too much time on their hands...they just don't spend most of it writing articles.
HereToHelp's Sixth Law: Because Wikipedia attracts more fanboys than experts on "traditional" subjects, general, important articles are worse off than cruft articles that meet notability.
HereToHelp's Seventh Law: You can tell whether an addition is worth keeping by whether it contains the second person.
HereTohelp's Eight Law: Whoever accuses someone of acting in bad faith is also acting in bad faith.
HereToHelp's Lamentation of Copyright: More harm is done to the encyclopedia by editors enforcing copyrights than by the copyright owners enforcing them.
Noisy's Law: You can tell someone's role by their edit profile: Mainly Wikipedia space – an admin; mainly User or Talk space – an editor; mainly article space – a valuable Wikipedian. What's yours?
Septentrionalis's Two Marks of Crankishness:
- This source must be perfect; it appeared in a peer reviewed journal.
- This perfect source was rejected because of the Foolander conspiracy against The Theory.
Really skilled cranks can achieve both of these in the same sentence.
Knucmo2's law of Wikipedia – More often than not, for every act of vandalism at Wikipedia, there are at least 3 RC patrollers ready to revert.
Knucmo2's second law (in contradiction of Alhutch's law) – editing Wikipedia is neither a privilege, nor a right, but an opportunity. (A privilege is an honour granted by a government or group. No groups or governments on Wikipedia grant this right, as it would be a contradiction of the principle that anyone can edit it (with a computer of course). Nor is it a right, since an editor has no "just claim" or ownership to enact editing upon Wikipedia.)
Knucmo2's third law of Wikipedia – Attempts to change POV articles to NPOV invariably result from a different POV.
Corollary: The Wrong Version
Sceptre's law: only admins and vandals ever use policy.
Alkivar's law: as the number of users in #wikipedia increases... the closer to #GNAA it becomes
Sceptre's second law: If only five bytes have been added to an article in a diff by an IP, it will almost always be the word gay.
Knucmo2's fourth law of Wikipedia: Biography pages on Wikipedia tend to receive most contributions from either their greatest advocates or greatest detractors.
Jfdwolff's law: The more attributes (e.g. bold, capitals, italics) used to post a trivial factoid in an article, the less likely that it is notable
Ellywa's law: Ellywa's law is a variation on Murphy's law. It states that when a Wikipedia page has existed long enough, a new page will appear with the same subject, but under a different name.
Aquilina's Carnot law: as any contentious article cycles through the four states: (low cruft, low POV) --isothermal expansion--> (high cruft, low POV) --increasing temperature--> (high cruft, high POV) --mass pruning--> (low cruft, high POV) --mass voting and citing--> (low cruft, low POV), it generates enough heat to sustain several edit wars, and may also do a small amount of work on the surrounding encyclopaedia
DragonflySixtyseven's law – Vandalizing Wikipedia is like masturbating. It feels good to you, but not to anybody else, and it results in a sudden spurt of useless information that needs to be cleaned up.
Durova's corollary: by this definition all vandals are male.
Counter-corollary: not really, but it does imply a larger ammount of male vandalism than female vandalism (except in some cases). – Manifestation (talk)
Sceptre's abuse law: If a user gets a valid block for longer than the policy guideline, the blocking admin will be accused of admin abuse. Will (^E_@) T 12:28, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
Loom91's First Law: (contradicting Bhadani's First Law) All attempts to determine the Truth instead of the NPOV are predestined to be complete failures for the simple reason that the Truth is a construct of the mind and as such necessarily subjective. Loom91 12:24, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
Corollary: What must pass for Truth in Wikipedia is determined by consensus. Loom91 12:24, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
Sub-corollary: Wikiality does exist. Mouse is back 22:11, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Users who cite "Wikipedia is not a democracy" when the consensus is overwhelmingly against their POV are usually doing so because they have no better argument. Kevin Baas^talk 20:15, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
^demon's Website Law: The number of vandals on an article referring to a website is directly proportional to the website's Alexa ranking.
- ^demon's corollary – The lower the Alexa rating, the more POV the website article will be.
Tearlach's First Law. The narrower the topic range of articles edited, the more likely that editor to be a problem user. Tearlach 12:29, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
Tearlach's Second Law. The quality of articles on regional politics is inversely proportional to the number of local editors editing from IP addresses. Tearlach 21:06, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
Josen's Law: People called Willy should not use that as their username ON WHEELS!
Alphax's third law: Articles on fictional subjects should include as much detail about the real-world aspects as possible, and make a clear distinction between fact and fiction.
Corollary: The amount of detail on the real-world aspects is inversely proportional to the average age of the fanbase, and directly proportional to the age of the subject. [ælfəks] 06:51, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
Kitia's law: Micronations rule!
Deckiller's law of Fictional Miniarticle Lists: There is always a 90 percent chance that a fan will dump his cruft into a related list. There is always a 100 percent chance that a fan will dump his cruft into a two sentence article if there is no list. CONCLUSION: Take the list over the 150 miniarticles.
Kizor's ~~hopelessly vague law~~ lament: Maintaining good content is at least as difficult as creating good content. --Kizor 12:24, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
That's not vague at all; it's absolutely correct. Many of us deal with that on a daily basis.--Here T oHelp 22:34, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Ikiroid's law—as the amount of communication and process between administrators and everyone else decreases, the chance of a cabal's existence approaches 1.--The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 20:34, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
GangstaEB's law – Even though it isn't all that hard to become an administrator, you are still in a very powerful spot. Gang sta EB (sliding logs~dive logs) 12:56, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
GangstaEB's second law – (Prediction) In the next 3 years, Wikipedia will be a MySpace. Only Exo-pedians will keep it going as an encyclopedia. Gang sta EB (sliding logs~dive logs) 16:45, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
Mailer Diablo's Second Law – The Wikipedians who cast the votes decide nothing. The sysop/'crat who count the votes decide everything. (adapted from Stalin).
Deckiller's self-discovered law of over editing: When a user pushed more than four articles to featured status in a three week period, the user will become ten times more rude, snappy, and frank about matters.
Mailer Diablo's Third Law – Probability of an editor gaining adminship is inversely proportional to probability of landing in ArbCom as a defendant, provided that an editor is not already an admin.
Extreme Unction's Third Law – Problematic users will drive good users away from Wikipedia far more often than good users will drive away problematic ones.
Corollary: Straightforward vandals are excepted. Good users drive those away all the time and give each other high-fives.
JDG's First Law – There are Waves or Generations of Wikipedia Editors, with a Generation time exactly equal to the human gestation period.
JDG's First and a Half Law – The earliest Generation of Wikipedians (that is, the Wales/Essjay Cabal) is the most likely to insist on new content being "encyclopedic", despite the fact that Wikipedia ceased being an Encyclopedia, and became an entity with no descriptor, by the time of the Third Generation. _{The closest English descriptor is "Megacompendium".}
Bachmann's Law: Trolls are the driving force of Wikipedia. The worst trolls often spur the best editors into creating a brilliant article with watertight references where without the trollish ecapades we would only have a brief stub [10]
Sagredo's Corollary: The ability of an editor is proportional to the degree to which the editor has been trolled.
Voice of All's law: the level of the subjectivity of any debate regarding the inclusion of an article or image is inversely proportional to the extent of it's informative nature. See also: User:Voice of All/Sexual image concerns
Teke's law: The participation turnout for an Article for Deletion is often proportional to the amount of edit-warring in said article.
Extreme Unction's Fourth Law – Any article, or edit to an article, which is accompanied by the exhortation "PLEASE DON'T DELETE THIS!" (or similar phrasing) almost certainly needs to be deleted as soon as you can hit the delete button.
Luigi30's Corollary: If an AFD comment is titled Don't delete, this law also applies. Luigi30 (Taλk) 13:15, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

JFW's corollary: The same for speedy keep (unless it's the first vote because the nominator is mistaken)
Slowking Man's second law – As the time between the last edit to an article and the last edit to the article's Talk page increases, the more likely the article is to be filled with cruft, spam, and other unencyclopedic information.
Andjam's fifth law of bad faith: A user asking for a photo to accompany Harlequin type ichthyosis is more likely to be a fan of Ogrish.com than an expert in congenital disorders. (For previous laws, see Andjam/Andjam's laws)
OpenToppedBus's first law: Over time, the average quality of Wikipedia articles rises, but Wikipedians' standards rise more quickly. Thus, a three-paragraph article on a minor topic, which two years ago might have been considered perfectly adequate, is likely today to be marked as a stub, even if it has now expanded to five paragraphs with a photo and references.
Corollary: The higher the standards that Wikipedia aims for, the more that Wikipedia will appear sub-standard to the outside world.
Common sense is surprisingly uncommon.
Observation: People have five senses and common isn't one of them.
Archer's Adage: People who name laws, axioms, and principles after themselves are pompous asses.
(Nevertheless,) Outriggr's first law: as the encyclopedic value of the topic of a Featured Article Candidate approaches Zero, the probability of its defender saying "your objection is not actionable" approaches One.
Cnriaczoy42's Assumption : If God didn't like Wikipedia, he would have nominated it for deletion.
HereToHelp's corollary: If God didn't like typos, he would have nominated them for "delition".
SigPig's Observation: God did nominate typos for "delition", but could not achieve "concensus".
The Bread's law – The more you hate a user, the more likely you are to come in contact with them
Titoxd's laws:
- First law: No matter what you do, someone out there, somewhere, will hate it.
- Second law: If the person who hates it is not called Jimbo or Brion, then it probably wasn't as bad.
- Third law: Telling others how to stop wasting their time is a good way to waste yours.
Durova's first law: any editor who makes an assertion that is simultaneously wrong on three or more levels is a person who is immune to reason.
Durova's second law: armchair conspiracy theorizing is easy, quick, and pleasant; actual gumshoe work is difficult, slow, and painful. Therefore, within a pool of volunteer labor, crank theorists will always outnumber genuine detectives.
Durova's third law: the greater the quantity of crank theorists, the harder it becomes for a genuine detective to get a fair hearing when one cracks a complex case.
Durova's fourth law: small organizations run on relationships. Formal policies emerge when the organization becomes too large to operate on that basis. Policies continue to grow in both quantity and complexity in proportion to organizational growth until the policies no longer work, at which point the policies remain in place while the organization reverts to running on relationships.
Durova's fifth law: given problem A and potential solution B (where B is flawed and has met with repeated rejection), if an editor proposes a new solution C which bears superficial similarity to B but eliminates B's pitfalls then 35% or more of respondants will mistake C for B and reject it on sight.
Humus sapiens' first law: Attempts to refute a conspiracy theory become part of the plot.
Humus sapiens' second law: Radical users tend to radicalize others and polarize the atmosphere.
Mailer Diablo's Forth Law : Thou who seek office to the degree with an agenda, shall be inversely proportional to one's success.
RobertG's Wikipedian Grammar. Irregular verb number 1: I am contributing in agreement with consensus, you are soapboxing in favour of a point of view with which I disagree, he/she is disrupting Wikipedia to make a point.
i4's Law of Frequency: The number of entries a contributor makes & the willingness of that contributor to return and add more work is directly proportional to the Arcane Index,(AI=O x N). (Arcane Index = Obscurity of the subject x Number of linkages to a current event in the news.) The number of other subject entries, after a rise in the Arcane Index, will follow a Bell Curve that is inversely proportional to the number of users who view the Arcane Indexed entry as a result of it's prominence in the public's awareness. The inverse proportionality will climb as the number of users viewing the entry increases and fade as the subject matter of the entry fades from public awareness.
i4's Law of Frequency Corollary #1: The total number of posts will rise proportionate to the number of edits as the originating contributor attempts to defend and edit additions or subtractions from the entry and begin a hyperbolic downward curve as the contributor's "Patience With Fools", (PWF) evaporates. {Still working on the PWF formula}

i4's Law of Frequency Corollary #2: The number of contributions will decrease as the originating contributor finds an increase in the number of edits that differ from the originating contributor's knowledge base and slowly increase in direct proportion to the number of people the originating contributor forgets disagreed with his/her knowledge.
Durova's sixth law: a problem editor who really deserves to be banned will demonstrate the need for banning conclusively at the end of an arbitration or investigation.
Durova's seventh law: one of the most difficult things to demand of a person is that they do the right thing when the right thing is unpleasant and the person's actions will probably be interpreted in bad faith. This is the standard expectation that problem users have of administrators.
Durova's eighth law: the real stakes of Wikipedia disputes seldom amount to much.
Durova's ninth law: judicious humor is invaluable.
Picaroon's first law: The length of a thread relating to an interpersonal dispute on the administrator's noticeboard is inversely proportional to the likelihood something useful is going to be said.
Picaroon's second law: There isn't any point in debating the legitimacy of an otherwise sound action just because it's illegitimate.
LordAmeth's Koan: As in reality, so in Wikipedia.
Corollary: Those who seek to obscure the Truth in reality, as well as those to whom the Truth has been obscured, shall perpetuate such obfuscation on Wikipedia.

Corollary: The educated and informed shall always be greatly outnumbered by those who are not.
J.S.'s first law: The first editor to throw a user conduct policy at another is likely to be the one who would benefit the most from reading it.
J.S.'s second law: Show me an admin who has never been called a nazi and I'll show you an admin who is not doing their job.
Aervanath's Meta-Law on Raul's Laws: As the number of laws increases, the probability of some moron making a law about Raul's Laws approaces unity.
Fyslee's first law: "Collaboration trumps all other policies." ..elaborated here.
Wikitruth's law: "If you tell Wikipedians to trim some fingernails, the nature of the Wikipedia environment is that someone will start chopping off hands. And after you go 'Hey, slow down, Tex, that's gone too far', they'll switch to just chopping off fingers and everyone's happy at the compromise." [11]
wizardrydragon's first law of Wikipedia: In a dispute between developers and anyone else about features, the developer always wins.
- Essjay's exception: Where "anyone else" = Jimbo Wales, the developer never wins. (Same where "anyone else" = The Board of Trustees.)
Ohnoitsjamie's Law of External Links: The more vociferous and lengthy a user's argument that an external link they've added belongs in an article, the less likely is it that it actually belongs. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 00:35, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
JoeSmack's first, second and third law of major contributions: reliable sources, reliable sources, reliable sources! JoeSmack ^Talk 17:28, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
SigPig's Postulate: The truth is out there...but has been speedy deleted (G1).
SigPig's Definition: A List is a priceless resource for researchers and casual users alike: an ordered, itemized collection of related data of tremendous encyclopaedic value, which amplifies and expands each item in the list with insightful information, and complements the information in related articles in a manner that cannot be achieved through the use of the lowly Category.
Exception: Unless it's about a subject I have no interest in, in which case it's cruft.
Carptrash's Law #1. If you see someone write "the fact is, the truth is, in reality, obviously, in the final analysis, I know, everyone knows, common sense will tell you, always, actually, everyone agrees, of course, clearly, without a doubt, correct me if I'm wrong, certainly, it can't be argued, unquestionably, according to unbiased observers", or "technically", then you are about to read that person's opinion.
HereToHelp's corollary: If you instead see a phrase that denotes an opinion, the fact is, you will still find an opinion.--Here T oHelp 11:53, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Jreferee's corollary: If their statement contains three or more adverbs ending in -ly (e.g. obviously, actually, clearly, certainly, unquestionably, technically), then you are about to read that person's biased opinion.
Carptrash's Law #2: The more #1 Hits on Google an editor gets the better s/he feels and the less likely the articles are to be of universal interest.
Arritt's First Axiom: Any complaint that includes reference to "censorship" or similar wording can safely be disregarded.
- Comment: Closely related to Antandrus's First Observation.
Arritt's Second Axiom: Any complaint that includes reference to "admin abuse" or similar wording should be taken seriously, as it is likely to provide evidence that an admin is indeed being abused.
Scepia's Law: As The Number Of Capitalized Words Increases, The Frequency Of Grammatical Errors Decreases.
Carptrash's Tangent: Unless the posting is ALL in capitols, in which case grammar usually flies out the window.

User:HereToHelp's corollary: Capitals affect only grammar, not spelling. Something can be written in sentence case and still be misspelled.--Here T oHelp 01:03, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
Durova's tenth law: A significant proportion of the sneaky vandals who eventually get caught bring themselves to the attention of Wikipedia's sysops by either making frivolous allegations against a productive editor or by overreacting to a legitimate request for investigation.
Durova's eleventh law: An unknown number of sneaky vandals continue to subvert Wikipedia because they keep a low profile.
Durova's twelfth law: Vandals attack Wikipedia for three reasons: for kicks, for ideology, or for profit. Only the first of those reasons is easy to dissuade.
Gracenotes' observation: If someone contributes a lot, but his/her user page has never grown beyond a redirect page or page with little or no text, it is more likely that this account is not their first.
Durova's thirteenth law: Editor X has a strong ideology and comes to Wikipedia to promote it, sidestepping various policies along the way. Editors Y and Z object, so Editor X presumes Y and Z are conspirators for the opposing ideology. When Y and Z point to X's policy violations, X wikilawyers to accuse Y and Z of similar policy violations. Run any ideology through that grinder and it produces the same sausage.
Durova's fourteenth law: An editor who uses logical fallacies habitually will continue to use them even when the result is counterproductive. If someone else takes the time to identify specific instances and link to the relevant fallacies' Latin names, the pseudologician will generate a countercharge of fallacious reasoning and the countercharge will satisfy the definitions of both tu quoque and proof by assertion.
Durova's fifteenth law: All the obvious methods to manipulate Wikipedia content have already been tried. The seductive thing about them is that sometimes they appear to work, but only just long enough to become major embarrassments for their perpetrators when their edits become generally known.
Yamamoto Ichiro's law: More obscene/obvious vandalism such as "wikipedia sucks", page blanking or adding vulgar images are reverted faster than the vandalism of something less obvious, such as inserting "[Insert a common name] was here" vandalism. The rate which less obvious vandalism gets reverted is proportional to the page's popularity, amount of RC patrols/editors who could potentially recognize the vandalism, and the obscureness of the vandalism.
Bhadani's Second Law: When a building is on fire, a leader will not survey everyone to see what the consensus is about a response. It is time for action.
Deckiller's Third Law: The quality of a Featured Article Candidate's prose is inversely proportional to the quality of the referencing.
Corollary: Except in the situations where reviewers don't treat FAC like RfA.
Septentrionalis' lemma: this is because the quality of the research is inversely proportional to the compliance with the Manual of Style.
Deckiller's Fourth Law: The amount of redundancies in an article is directly proportional to the amount of time the article's writer spends in law classes.
dkriegls' First Law: The number of personal attacks made by an editor is inversely correlated to the number of reference used to defend their position.
dkriegls' Second Law: The number of personal attacks made by an editor is positively correlated to the number of useless quotes provided to defend their position.
ConMan's First Law of AfD: When an article falls flat on its face with regards to all possible standards in the appropriate notability guideline and gets nominated for deletion, that's when its creator will shout "but it's only a guideline!"
ConMan's Second Law of AfD: 95% of the time, if a comment in an AFD is prefixed with "Do Not Delete" rather than "Keep", it can be safely ignored.
Sceptre's fourth law: The amount of complaints an administrator gets is directly proportional to the quality of the job they are doing.
Haemo's Principle: The introduction of trivia into articles commences a circular process. Trivia expands to become trivia sections, which become trivia articles, which become AfD's about trivia articles, which end with merging the original trivia back into the article. Process repeats ad inf.
Sceptre's fifth law: (a variant of Godwin's Law) – As any discussion of any social science lengthens, the probability of an editor accusing another of being "nationalist" becomes one. If this happens, the accuser automatically loses the argument.
MariusM's law: Any newbie who is using the word "sockpuppet" is a sockpuppet.
Amarkov's first law: Those who most vehemently insist on following a rule are the most likely to ignore that rule when it contradicts their opinion.
Amarkov's second law: The number of complaints that one is not a sockpuppet is directly proportional to the probability that one is in fact a sockpuppet.
Amarkov's third law: No comment is so direct that it will not be misquoted out of context to support a stupid opinion. -Amarkov moo! 01:11, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
Woodrow Wilson's law: I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 04:45, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
Gizza's first law: Those who believe that WP:NPOV refers to equal respect towards all verifiable perspectives are Wikipedians. Those who think that NPOV means equal coverage of all verifiable perspectives are trolls.
Zeibura's law: Any page listed on Special:Newpages accompanied by an edit summary which begins with "Created page with '{{hangon}}..." can be safely deleted.
Andy's Law reads: There is greater than 50% probability that I am a bigger jerk than any other user who I think is a jerk.
Talshiarr's first observation (derived from Murphy's law): Those who can complain, eventually will.
Corollary: Those who haven't complained yet merely haven't read or contributed enough to find something to complain about.
Gizza's second law: It takes two (or more) to edit war.
Picaroon's contradiction: You sure about that?

Borb's counter-contradiction: an edit war is more than 2 reverts of other people edits. If there is not another person, there is not edits from another person, and therefore they cannot be reverted, and so you can't revert them 3 times
Seraphimblade's law: The more talk-page posts containing profanity an admin has on his or her talk page, the better of a job that admin is doing. Bonus points if any posts are in ALL CAPS or bolded. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 07:54, 11 July 2007 (UTC)
Kizor's Corollary: Excepting posts made by that admin.

Kwsn's Corollary: userpage vandalism counts too.
Kwsn's law: half the time that something gets deleted under WP:CRYSTAL, it comes back. Kwsn^(Ni!) 14:28, 11 July 2007 (UTC)
Seraphimblade's corollary: That means half of what's deleted by WP:CRYSTAL never actually materializes. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:00, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
Kizor's law of humility: Better an editor who's often wrong and knows it than an editor who's very seldom wrong and knows it.
Anchoress's law: By the time it becomes obvious to the general editing population that an individual editor's wagon is careening towards the gulch, all attempts to head them off at the pass will merely serve to hasten their departure.
Eye's first law of AfD debate: the less notable the article, the more ferociously it will be defended by its creator.
Corollary: As the notability of a subject approaches zero, the likelihood of Google-hits being cited as proof of notability approaches one.
Eye's second law of AfD debate: the less well-sourced the article, the more linkspam it contains.
Corollary: As the number of reliable sources in an article approaches zero, the likelihood of it containing external links to Bebo and MySpace approaches one.
szyslak's first law: If one editor quotes a policy page, and another editor counters by quoting elsewhere from the same policy page, chances are that one or both editors is engaging in wikilawyering.
szyslak's second law: Any time a section titled "Criticism" begins with the word "Some", chances are the article is not feature quality.
Kmarinas86's First motion of Law^iki – An article will remain at its current length unless acted upon by stress applied over its area.
Kmarinas86's Second motion of Law^iki – The amount of stress applied over an article's area is proportional to the number of sections and the severity of edits therein.
Kmarinas86's Third motion of Law^iki – The positive stress on the article is equal to, but opposite of, the negative stress on its editors.
Kmarinas86's Archwiki principle – Any article will encounter progress equal to, but opposite of, the weight of important subjects it displaces.
Kmarinas86's Eye amapeersecond In^g-Law^iki – The stress applied to each unit area of the article as a result of the peer review process is proportional to the product of the nominator's diligence and the diligence of the reviewer(s) and the sum of enlightments the each receives from one another.
Kmarinas86's Law of Toll – It is logical to invalidate an event by invalidating its effects, but it is illogical to invalidate an event by invalidating its causes.
Omniferous's Law of Deep Thought- One who is willing to read enough of the rules so as to reach this far on the list must have, in some part of them, an urge to conform and therefore obey the rules, seeing as they wish for a better understanding of the mechanics of this community.
Ben's Revolting Realization – everyone who comes across Raul's laws eventually adds one of their own.
Mathmo's contradiction: I have not added one of my own.... oh.... oops!
Avi's first rule: In the mind of each and every editor there exists an equal and opposite opposing cabal.
Avi's second rule: The time between a user's first edit and their being indefinitely blocked for disruptive editing is inversely proportional to the strength of the claims of neutrality, or the search thereof, in their username.
szyslak's third law: If you accuse a large group of editors of "improper reverts", odds are you're the one making unhelpful reverts.
szyslak's fourth law: If an accusation of "vandalism" is misspelled, typed in all capitals or defined as "removeing true informatoin!!!!!!", the truth value of said accusation approaches zero.
Durova's umpteenth law: WP:AGF has one legitimate exception. When writing any site policy, guideline, or procedure assume the worst faith imaginable in as many permutations as possible. Whatever it is, once the thing becomes official the wikilawyers will search for loopholes.
- Kwsn's corollary: Said wikilawyers will exploit said loopholes until someone gets hurt.
Kizor's Law of Roulette: "Consensus Can Change" with keep decisions. Delete decisions are in force indefinitely. Once an article's existence becomes controversial, that article survives until it can be hammered enough to give.
Corollary: Wikipedia's coverage on nonessential topics depends on what their opponents have not bothered to destroy yet.
szyslak's fifth law: In any discussion on WP:AN or WP:ANI about how someone is an evil/abusive/corrupt/immoral sysop, the odds that the admin in question is indeed evil, abusive, corrupt or immoral are about 1 in 100,000.
Unless the admin responds by explaining that the poster is evil, abusive, corrupt or immoral; in which case, the odds increase to about 1 in 10. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:12, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
Bfigura's Law of Lost Causes: Arguing with a user who thinks Wikipedia would be better off if it didn't have policies is a hopeless endeavor. The best solution is to wait for the onset of: Please be a giant dick, so we can ban you.
TKD's Law of Speedy Deletion: All other things equal, the probability that a new page is speedily deletable is proportional to the number of first- and second-person pronouns and imperative sentences.
Phoenix 15's law: all rules and guidelines add up to this; Respect!
Pharos's Law of Caveats: Given sufficient research, it is impossible to make an unqualified statement on any subject.
Pharos's Law of Geocities: Given a POV of arbitrary craziness, there will always be at least one website found purporting to represent an "international society" supporting such a POV.
I do not exist's First Law: Articles concerning some particular minority will be closely watched by said minority, to ensure conformance with the public image the minority wishes to present.
I do not exist's Second Law: Members of a minority, who are nonetheless able to remain objective with respect to the minority, do not edit articles relating thereto.
I do not exist's Third Law: Every minority will claim immunity for its articles, categories, userboxes and user categories, invariably claiming, should the need to include such content be questioned, that the user who did so is obviously an agent of the oppressive majority.
Merovingian's First Corollary: Every majority will claim immunity for its articles, categories, userboxes and user categories, invariably claiming, should the need to include such content be questioned, that the user who did so is obviously an agent of the terrorizing minority.
Jehochman's First Epigram: A troll's job is being dickish in novel ways.
Jehochman's Second Epigram: Children are miniature trolls.
Corollary: Trolls are overgrown children.
Obligatory Calvin and Hobbes quote: "A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day."
Corollary: Assumptions that a person or group is not worth respectful treatment are strongly self-fulfilling.

Second corollary: A polite explanation is often what separates a seemingly arbitrary action from a well-reasoned one. One consisting only of an [[WP:ACRONYM]] or "cruft" often feels like a slap to the face. Both doubly so when talking to casual anons, rather than WP geeks.
Amarkov's Fourth Law: The probability of Wikidrama increasing further is directly proportional to the amount of Wikidrama already existing.
Coren's first law: The probability of an article being spam or advocacy is exponentially proportional to the author's conviction of its topic's importance.
- Corollary: The most egregious spam and advocacy will be the most vigorously defended.
  - Amarkov's extension: In general, vigor of defense is inversely correlated to the probability that the thing being defended is good. -Amarkov moo! 00:15, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
KnowledgeOfSelf's First law: Invariably on any given day, 75% of vandalism to Wikipedia will contain the words pie, or love or some variation thereof.
Piotrus' Principle; If it's worth proving on the talk page, it's probably worth mentioning in the article.
- Piotrus hasn't said this, but he acts on it (comparte the long discussion on the article talk page). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:12, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
  - Double sharp's Corollary: If it's worth worrying about in your edit summary, it's probably worth putting into your actual edit.
General Eskimo's First law: The majority of humanity is absurdly stupid, and the same goes for Wikipedia users and vandals alike; which is why all should be treated with the most harsh and unforgiving words the English language (or any language) has to offer.
The Lack of Surprise Rule: People are frequently surprised by the things listed at Wikipedia:Things that should not be surprising.
The Dark Lord's intrusion into this list of laws: Common sense (and some wise, dead philosopher) states that if it is broken, fix it. Wikibreaks, are by their own admission, broken, so hence are and should be mended as soon as possible.
Swatjester's first law: It's never the troll's fault.
Swatjester's first corollary: It's always the admin's fault.
Swatjester's second law: The amount of drama in any nationalist debate on Wikipedia is inversely proportional to how much everyone else cares about it.
Swatjester's second corollary: The likelihood of an editor being a POV-pushing troll is directly related to whether or not they refer to themselves as a member of an obscure ethnic group, rather than a citizen of an existing country.
Messedrocker's Law: Everything will eventually be opposed by at least one person.
The Duke of Waltham's First Law: The number of subpages an editor has in their userspace is inversely proportional to the number of their contributions to the mainspace.
The Duke of Waltham's Second Law: Small mistakes, like common grammar slips and minor formatting errors, are bound to spread because nobody makes a fuss about correcting them.
- Exception: Many mistakes are pointed out by editors who are so anal-retentive that nobody takes them seriously, so this is not really an exception.
- Corollary: It is very easy for editors in Wikipedia and User talk pages to deviate from the instructions given at the top, as long as one editor makes a mistake and said instructions are not visible from that part of the page.
  - Sub-corollary: the quality of the grammar, formatting, and indention of posts in such talk pages deteriorates increasingly as the pages grow longer.
    - Sub-sub-corollary: such deterioration is generally permanent because attempting to correct another editor's posts may be the very chance they seek to make your life a living hell.
The Duke of Waltham's Observation on Fatigue: The more conscientious an editor is, and the more willing that editor is to help resolve disputes, the less it will take for them to leave Wikipedia (for any length of time).
The Duke of Waltham's Barter Theory: The editors that give out the most barnstars usually do it because they expect to receive as many barnstars in return (or, if not, in order to create useful connections or increase their own edit counts).
The Duke of Waltham's Screening Principle: If an editor has read this list all the way to this point, and has not yet laughed at all, that editor ought to be considered a serious threat to the harmony of the community as a potential source of tension and incivility.
The Duke of Waltham's Rule of Redundancy: Everything listed here will eventually be, or already has been, retold in a different manner, so as to give the opportunity to more editors to give their names to laws.
- Corollary: Many editors who seem to be writing redundant laws because they did not pay enough attention to avoid redundancy are actually conforming to the Rule subconsciously.
Kmarinas86's Law of Law: A law is most clear when it is written in a 7th grade reading level.
Kmarinas86's Law of Contradiction: When one law contradicts the other(s), the funniest one applies first.
BanyanTree's Principle: The number of closed off-wiki venues for discussion of actionable on-wiki matters is inversely related to the credibility of on-wiki discussion and process.
Merovingian's First Law: As the number of edits to an article increases, the probability that the article will contain a homophone mistake approaches one.
Durova's law of leadership: two kinds of people rise in any organization: people who like to get things done and people who like to be in charge. The organization's dysfunctionality is directly proportional to the latter group.
- Corollary: Everybody thinks they are in the former group.
Durova's law of exhibitionism: whenever a photograph of a penis gets uploaded it is safe to assume that (a) it is the editor's own member, and (b) no woman will touch it.
Miles' law of unexhibitionistic antiporn: guys upload pictures of their penises all the time, but for some reason we never get photographs in List of sex positions, just drawings.
Sniperz11's 2nd law of Wikidynamics – Every Featured Article only gets worse.
Wikipedian's law of Diminishing return: As the editor's wiki-age increases, his useful edits decrease.
Sniperz11's law of averages of intelligence (adapted from George Carlin): Think of how stupid the average wikipedian is and you realize that half of them are stupider than that.
- Corollary 1: Then realize that most articles will be edited by the lower half.
- Corollary 2: The intelligence of vandals cannot be measured due to their limited vocabularies.
- Dinoguy1000's Corollary: Similarly, considering the uselessness of the average edit, by definition half of all edits are more useless than that.
Principle of Amish accuracy: The Accuracy and NPOV of a page is directly proportional to the distance between the subject and a computer. Thus, since there are no (really) Amish editors on Wikipedia, there is no conflict of Interest, and therefore, the Amish page is the most accurate and NPOV page on Wikipedia.
RobertG's Wikipedian Grammar. Irregular verb number 2: I have not provided citations because I know my facts are correct, indeed I am a respected academic whose credentials are beyond question and therefore I am too busy, and no-one would check the references anyway; you are not providing citations because you are an ignoramus who doesn't know any better; he/she continually contributes original research in violation of policy and should be blocked.
User:AnnieTigerChucky Before relying on a Wikipedia article make sure there is ref tags and references to reliable recourses.
User:Pafferguy The chance that something unusual or little-known is on Wikipedia is inversely proportional to how useful it is.
User:Pafferguy's second law: in any wikipedia debate, the size of the middle ground decreases exponentially as the average difference in opinion rises.
1. Corollary: Both sides in any wikipedia debate will attack the middle ground more ferociously than each other.
Gizza's Third Law: The number of people who "WP:OWN" a particular article is inversely proportional to the quality and stability of that article.
LaPella's Law: The urge to edit is positively correlated with opposition, and uncorrelated with how many readers will benefit.
Norbert's Law: Once the number of laws in a list exceeds a critical mass (about six), the probability of new laws being tortured, unfunny and bland rises rapidly to unity.
1. Starstriker-Norbert Addendum: The probability that laws will be continuously and vigorously repeated under new and different scientific-sounding names rises rapidly to unity when placed under similar circumstances.
J.delanoy's Law of Vandals: When a vandal is warned by a bot, the probability that they will respond by very slightly vandalizing the same page they were warned for is equal to the probability that they will respond by either blanking the page in question or replacing the page with a sentence or phrase that includes a swear word.
jc37's observation: The more sincere the person, the action, the offer; the greater the likelihood of being accused of secret motivations, and otherwise being maligned.
jc37's corollary: The larger the group of people that you try to help, the more often you'll get your hands slapped.
Zahakiel's first law: If an article ain't broke, someone will try to fix it.
- Zahakiel's corollary to the first law: If an article is broke, someone will eventually nominate it for deletion.
- Zahakiel's second corollary to the first law: If a broken article survives AfD, the likelihood of it being improved before being considered for deletion again is inversely proportional to the ferocity with which its existence was defended by its nominator.
- Zahakiel's first exception to the second corollary to the first law: This does not include edits made by said nominator during the AfD process in an attempt to retain the article in question.
- Zahakiel's first observation regarding the first exception to the second corollary to the first law: The quality of these edits will generally display an equal proportion of esoteric knowledge and personal lameness.
Zahakiel's second law: The likelihood of the List of theological demons page being vandalized on any given day of the week is directly proportional to the the likelihood of the name of that day containing a vowel and ending in "y".[12]
Zahakiel's third law: Any sufficiently advanced vandal is indistinguishable from a genuine editor.
Zahakiel's razor: Never attribute to vandalism what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Zahakiel's fourth law: Any page that can be vandalized wTHIS PAGE SUX!!1
Zahakiel's fifth law: Eventually, every word in the world will be wiki-linkable. The appropriateness of those links, however, will generally be questionable.
Jakew's first rule of thumb: a talk page comment asserting that "this article is bias" (note the spelling) will likely be a soapbox rant. This is especially true if in capital letters.
Pharos's Law of the Target Audience: Wikipedia is carefully optimized for its target audience of technically-savvy amateur encyclopedia writers. In providing for this target audience, with reams of edit histories, discussions carefully cataloged on talk pages, and many assessments of article quality, it is a perfect success. For the general audience, who never read these things, not so much.
from Gwern's rules: "Rule 230: No matter what Rule 34 you see – it's not our fault." (Suggested for inclusion by Lucifer_Cat )
ClockworkSoul's only law of wikidynamics: without a continuous input of energy, the total entropy of any article tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.
Zginder's wikidynamics corollary—The maximum value is speedy delete general criterion 1, patent nonsense.
TenPoundHammer's law: If an article's name takes the form "(name of artist)'s nth studio album", it will not survive an Articles for Deletion discussion.
Beam's law: Civility will eventually be so anally "enforced" that you won't be allowed to say anything and Wikipedia will die. :(
TenPoundHammer's second law: The more frivolous the placement of a {{helpme}} tag, the longer it will sit unanswered, causing helpmebot to ping #wikipedia-en-help ad nauseam.
TenPoundHammer's third law: The more {{helpme}} templates on a page, the more likely they are to be highly frivolous.
Troll's glossary:
- Anglocentric: perversely insists on writing English.
  - Kmarinas86's collary: Branglocentric: perversely insists on writing British English (e.g. "sceptic" instead of "skeptic").
- Rude, biased, etc: Disagrees with the Truth
- Argumentative: Presents reasons for disagreeing with the Truth.
Definition (by ConMan) – wikisecond: The length of time between something (call it "X") being mentioned in pop culture (usually a cult TV show) and it appearing in a section or spinoff article entitled "X in popular culture".
Also the length of time between a comedian or other entertainer referring to a Wikipedia article and said article being vandalised by fans. See Stephen Colbert, Randall Munroe.
Durova's law of civility: whatever your standards are, be consistent. Individuals who are quick to demand apologies should be equally quick to extend apologies; Wikipedians who insult publicly should be equally ready to apologize publicly. Self-serving, cliquish, and unequal practices are worse than rudeness: they're hypocrisy. Hypocrisy has the same effect on good faith that termites have on wooden houses.
Durova's corollary: trolls who discover the value of consistency will ransack theories of ethics in search of a system by which to accuse their enemies of inconsistency. From the troll's perspective it is immaterial whether the intended target actually professes that belief system; the aim is to attack the opponent and influence onlookers. To a troll, all ethics are like plastic sporks: useful, despicable, and disposable.
Durova's law of bias: prejudice is the inverse of how many mistakes a person will be forgiven.
X!'s first law: The usefulness of an article over time always is similar to a Sine wave.
X!'s second law: For every exclamation point used in an unblock request, the likeliness that it will be accepted decreases by 20%.
X!'s third law: One out of every 20 admins will eventually become a drama magnet within 2 years of a successful RfA.
Everyme's law of articles to admins ratio: The ratio of articles to admins is roughly 1500:1 (currently: 8128). In July 2008, the number of articles was roughly the number of admins squared, a one-time phenomenon that will never return.
1. Addendum by X!: The current ratio is 8128:1. 724201 is the number of admins squared. It is 89.53% away from equal.
Durova's's law of mediocrity: policies that attempt to discourage incompetence and antisocial behaviors often end up discouraging all non-normative behavior including genius and innovation.
Ray's Razor: Any editor whose username includes the word "truth" shall be assumed disruptive until conclusively shown otherwise.
Starstriker's Law of Psychological Dynamics: Article expansion and creation is only driven by motivation, which can be rather difficult to find at times.
ConMan's Law of Converse Identification: Most vandals are IPs, so most IPs are vandals. Similarly, most cats have four legs and a tail, so most things with four legs and a tail are cats.
ClockworkSoul's second law: The average length of an editor's talk page posts correlates with that editor's crackpot coefficient.
Truthanado's rule of species: There are experts and there are editors. Being one does not necessarily make you the other.
Ironholds' Law: Any proposal on the RfA talkpage that is not put into action within three days will dissolve into an unnavigatable mess of what-ifs, counter-proposals and will then be archived before turning up on the talkpage again in three months as 'a new idea I just thought of', at which point it will go through the same process again.
Ironholds' Second Law: If you tag a page as 'non-notable' there is a fifty percent chance that the writer will leave a message on the talk page verifying that the person in question exists.
Ironholds' Third Law: If you tag a page as a 'copyright violation' there is a fifty percent chance that the writer will leave a message on the talk page explaining how notable the subject is.
Gordonofcartoon's Law of Conflict of Interest: "strongly encouraged to submit proposed edits for review on the article's talk page" will be interpreted as "micromanage the article and pester others to death via the talk page".
Kaldari's Law: Only trolls feel the need to define the word "troll".
Dinoguy1000's First Law: Any article addition that contains some variant or alternate phrasing of the text "it should [also] be noted that..." or "also noteworthy is..." is, almost without exception, not noteworthy.
Random reader's theorem – Controversial articles will invariably invite contentious edits.
Second Random Reader's Law of Time – If the amount of time a user has spent reading this page exceeds an hour, it is highly likely that the user's local time is past midnight, or that they have important work they should be doing.
- Conversely – If the user is reading this page at midnight (or any time thereafter), or has important work they should be doing, it is highly likely that they will spend more than an hour (if they have not done so already) reading this page.
Second Random Reader's Second Law of Time – If any user reaches this law, having read most/all of the previous laws, there is a good chance that they will have spent at least half an hour of their time trying to create another new law for this page.
Second Random Reader's Law of Imagination – Any user reaching this law, who has not complied with Second Random Reader's Second Law of Time, falls into one of two categories:
- Those who have already written a law on this page.
- Those who have no sense of humour.
  - Those who fall into the former category have an imagination constant (the measure of the imagination any given person possesses) which is proportional (but not equal) to the number of their law, with later laws requiring more imagination.
    - Exception – No one with a large imagination constant, even those with early laws, will fall into this category – they will still be trying to think of new laws while reading this page, and so are not subject to the Law of Imagination.
  - Those who fall into the latter category should be subdued immediately and subjected to any number of comedic sitcoms/jokes/cartoons/panel shows/stand-up acts/lolcats until their sense of humour has developed fully.
    - The test for the development of a sense of humour is to imagine yourself as a mighty warrior preparing to defeat a powerful evil villain, and to charge forward shouting absurd superhero "The Tick"'s battle cry, "Spoon!". If you do not end up laughing uncontrollably at the absurdity of your situation, you should begin the humour developmental program again. Extending the cry indefinitely ("Spoooooooooooooooooooooooooooon!") is conducive to laughter – as is walking into a room full of your friends before attempting this test.
Second Random Reader's Hypothesis – I hypothesise that roughly 15–20% of the people who read the Law of Imagination will attempt the Humour Development Test, regardless of whether they possess a sense of humour or not. Further tests are required.
Durova's law of ineptitude: with a pool of volunteer labor, sometimes you get what you paid for.
There are no winners at Arbitration, only losers. Skomorokh
Peter Jackson's law:
- in theory, "Wikipedia aims to present competing views in proportion to their representation in reliable sources on the subject." (WP:DUE)
- in practice, it tends to present competing views in proportion to their representation among the editors of the article
  - Brews ohare's corollary: Where a preponderance of editors share a common view, no amount of contrary sources or opposing logic will affect the WP article.
  - Brews ohare's second corollary: To contribute to a WP article, either pick a topic no-one is interested in, or assemble a cabal of editors who support your views.
Geni's law: Any wikipedian with a cat will sooner or later upload a picture of it.
- Durova's corollary: Eventually the cat will join the WikiVoices board of directors.
TenPoundHammer's second law: The subjects about which you know the most will always be the subjects whose Wikipedia articles require the most work and/or have virtually no other editors who know anything about them.
Dinoguy1000's Second Law: The longer a person spends reading this list, the greater the chance they will think of a rule to add which is either a rephrasing or generalization of a rule they have already read, or identical to a rule they have not. This rule itself is no exception, and is in fact a rephrasing and generalization of at least three other rules above.
- Dinoguy1000's Correlation: as the number of rules on this list increases, the probability of any randomly-selected rule being duplicated in this manner also increases.
Dinoguy1000's Third Law: as the number of corollaries on this list increases, the chance of an instance of the word "corollary" being misspelled increases. This can probably be generalized to a nontrivial trend for any sufficiently common word or phrase on this page.
Durova's law of gender: all female Wikipedians are presumptively Poetlister unless proven otherwise (via voice or actual meetup).
Durova's law of conflict: a few of Wikipedia's experienced editors roam from article to article shoving people around. When someone pushes back they will lock horns and charge. Yes, it's frustrating. And no, nobody is going to stop them. The thing to do is be polite and lay low until that person gets into a street brawl somewhere else. It won't solve the big problem, but on a small scale it usually works.
JamesBWatson's first law: The longer this list becomes the more daunting it will look, so the smaller will be the number of the laws that get read.
Olaf Davis's corollary: as fewer laws are read, the greater becomes the chance that people will add laws with names which already exist or put them in the wrong section.
Allen3's first axiom: If an editor lacks enough information about a subject to write even one complete sentence about it then the editor should delay article creation till after they have performed basic research about the subject.
- Corollary: Inability to write a complete sentence about a subject will not prevent the article creator's complaints when said article faces deletion.
JamesBWatson's first Law: Names of laws are case sensitive.
Banyan Tree's Law of Edible Flora: The first editor on an article about fruits and vegetables to make a tangential addition stating the local name of the plant in their country, as well as the local names of popular food preparations, will prompt a cascade of similar edits, resulting in the article gradually being dominated by a list of terms in foreign languages that serves little purpose other than stroking nationalist ego.
Reyk's Law: Whenever it is claimed a source exists when it doesn't, says something it doesn't, or is presented as substantial coverage when in fact it is exceedingly trivial, it is usually done either to promote pseudoscience or to rescue a fiction-related article at AfD.
DarkoNeko's statement. Any proposal made about desysoping inactive admins on the english Wikipedia is bound to fail.
Corollary : chances are that the most ferocious opposes will be said inactives, magically coming back after months without any edits.
Phantomsteve's Laws of RfA
First Law: If there are less than 3 open RfAs, then RfA is broken.

Second Law: If there are more than 2 open RfAs, then RfA is becoming too easy a process, and therefore it must be broken.

Third Law: If there have been no new RfAs opened in the last 3 days, someone must start a "ZOMG!!!!!! RfA is broken!" thread.

Fourth Law: If there have been more than 3 new RfAs opened in the last 3 days, someone must start an "OMG!!!! There are [insert number] open RfAs – RfA is not broken!" thread.

Fifth Law: If there is an open RfA suitable for an obvious SNOW closure, someone must start an "OMG!!!! ZOMG!!!!!!! Why do we allow such obvious no-hoper RfAs to be opened?" thread.

Sixth Law: If an admin !votes to support a candidate at RfA, they are looking to increase the number of cabal admins. If they !vote to oppose a candidate, they are trying to prevent a reasonable, intelligent, conscientious editor from becoming an admin. If they choose to voice a neutral position, they are checking with the cabal to see what the cabal thinks.

Seventh Law: If the candidate looks like a perfect candidate, they must be power-hungry (or possibly a sockpuppet of a banned former-admin).
Corollary: If the candidate made a single mistake 6 years ago, this must be held against them until the end of the universe
Corollary to the corollary: If the candidate has made more than 20,000 perfectly good edits, they probably don't have the relevant experience in the various areas in which they want to work
Corollary to the corollary to the corollary: If the candidate does have the relevant experience in the areas in which they want to work, they probably don't have any experience in the areas in which they have't said they want to work in, but which it can be assumed that they actually will work in (I can't be bothered with listing examples, as that would end up as WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG!)

Eighth Law: If a candidate is asked if they are a minor in their jurisdiction, but refuses to answer the question, they must be 10 years old.
Corollary: If the candidate answers that they are not a minor in their jurisdiction, they must be lying.
To get around this, make sure that when you create your account you set your location to Iran and your sex to female – the Age of majority for females in Iran is 9 years old. Then you can reply "yes" to the question....
Reyk's Second Law: The best way to get people to assume good faith is to show it.
The Grand Rans' Law of Six degrees of separation: Any Wikipedia page can be reached from any other page by following no more than six links.
Phantomsteve's Separatist Law: Unless the page is an orphan.
Pgallert's petty observations about Phantomsteve's Separatist Law:
Two incoming links still make an orphan. It might be hard to reach them but not impossible.

Any two articles tagged as orphan connect to each other via e.g.: Article1 => WP:Orphan => Category:Orphaned articles => Category:Orphaned articles from Month Year => Article2.

If the orphan notice is in an {{Article issues}} template, the path is: Article1 => Help:Link => Template:Orphan => WP:Orphan => Category:Orphaned articles => Category:Orphaned articles from Month Year => Article2.

If "edit this page" is regarded a link, then the path from one orphan to the next is only three links long: Article1 => Edit this page => (Hidden category) Category:All orphaned articles => Article2.

With a bit of luck, Special:Random serves as one-link connection.
Extreme Unction's Fifth Law: As the size of Raul's Laws increases, the probability that redundant laws will be added by people who haven't read the whole thing approaches 1.
seresin's law: As the size of Raul's Laws increases, the probability that redundant laws will be added by people who haven't read the whole thing approaches 1.
烏Γ's Corollary: Any user can add a corollary to make said law not completely redundant.
烏Γ's First Law: Everything on Wikipedia is uncountable, except for every list that counts things.
烏Γ's Second Law: The probability of someone memorizing every single policy decreases with the addition of each new policy, increases with every new account registration, decreases with every ban, and increases with every discovery of a sockpuppet.
Corollary: This law, in effect, creates a paradox.
Corollary to the corollary: The probability is already zero, so it doesn't matter.
Corollary to the corollary to the corollary: Thus this law effectively cancels itself out.
Corollary to the corollary to the corollary to the corollary: This thus revalidates the initial corollary.
Corollary⁵: This law is thus an infinite loop.
Corollary⁶: Impossible, since the loop stops at the paradox.

Revised corollary: This law is to be disregarded, as per the corollary to the corollary.
烏Γ's Third Law: Any user who adds a law to this page and subsequently counters it through the use of corollaries is completely insane.
Jeremystalked's Law: The first few things an editor checks when he encounters an editor whose edits he doesn't like are: the other editor's contributions; that editor's user page; and that editor's web presence, in that order. The purpose is to find material he can attack the other editor with.
Corollary: Superficial charm is always rewarded. The appearance of good faith, neutrality, and other wonderful traits for Wikipedians to have is much more important than actually possessing those traits.
ResMar's Law of Prominence: Your worth in the face of a Featured content delagate is directly proportionate to the amounts of bronze stars you have.
ResMar's Statement: A theory subverts a law. A law simply states something; a theory backs it up. ResMar 03:48, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
S Marshall's Law of Consensus ([13]): There is a consensus that Wikipedia operates by consensus, except for BLPs where there is no consensus whether or not we operate by consensus, flagged revisions where there is a consensus not to have a consensus, and discussions about consensus, where there is a consensus that consensus is not how we operate but there is no consensus about what replaces consensus, except for copyright violations and breaches of personal privacy, oversight requests, arbcom, and office actions.
S Marshall's 2nd Law: Caveat lector. This is the lesson of this site:- Do not trust what you read. You're on Wikipedia, which is by an order of magnitude the largest collection of information ever gathered in one place. It is also the largest collection of lies. Some are malicious lies, some are genuine misunderstandings, some are half-truths, and some are the lies that everyone believes—the theories that tomorrow's scientists will refute. Read, learn, but do not trust. The link to the disclaimer that's at the bottom of each page should be at the top. In bold. In huge font. In flashing red text so you cannot possibly miss it. Caveat lector. (User: S Marshall)
Kotniski's Law ([14]): Wikipedia's bureaucracy is only concerned with disputes over nothing. If it's about making the encyclopedia better or worse, they stay well out of it – that sort of thing is apparently best left to chance.
Ludwigs2's Law ([15]): a good 20% of all editors are agenda-driven and uninterested in the quality of the article from an abstract point of view. under those conditions, you might as well not even talk about the rules or meaning of consensus; people are going to take whatever rules or meanings you provide and game them to achieve their own ends. the rules of consensus only matter where people are actually interested in working towards it
- Peter Jackson's corollary: any proposed policy reform to deal with the problem is unlikely to achieve the requisite consensus
  - secondary corollary: the problem is unlikely to be solved without WMF intervention
    - tertiary corollary: the problem is unlikely to be solved unless Wikipedia deteriorates so far as to threaten funding and force WMF intervention
      - quaternary corollary: anyone who wants to improve Wikipedia should not, repeat not, improve Wikipedia ... er ...?
Peter Jackson's Second Law: Wikipedia is "in denial": "The community generally believes that the Wikipedia method works" (Wikipedia: Requests for comment/User conduct/Creation#Wikilawyering)
Peter Jackson's Third Law: Wikipedia is a curate's egg
Peter Jackson's Syllogism:
- all monopolies are evil
- Wikipedia is a monopoly
- therefore Wikipedia is evil
Peter Jackson's Outline of Dispute Resolution:
1. discuss it
2. invite other people to join the discussion
3. discuss it some more
4. till the cows come home
Ling.Nut's Law ([16], [17], [18]): "Wikipedia is utterly useless for controversial issues. Its articles ALWAYS assume a POV. NPOV is a polite fiction we all mumble to ourselves and pretend it exists; it's a Lie-to-children. ... "consensus" [is in practice] "the most committed gang of editors."
Peter Jackson's Principle of Conflict of Interest: Wikipedia itself has a COI on any article (or ex-article) about itself or its competitors.
X!'s paraphrasing of NocturneNoir's comment: Biased people always call others biased in attempts to influence bias. (X! · talk) · @087 · 01:05, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
Peter Jackson's Fourth Law (sorry, I'm breaking the law that says laws must always come in threes, but I can't think of another title): Wikipedia's governance can be summarized as anarchy tempered by arbitration.
User:AndyTheGrump's Law: the answer is probably a definite maybe ([19])
User:AndyTheGrump's 2nd Law: "having seen Pandas not eating bananas is no proof that they don't do it when you're not looking..."...see also other Panda Diet ramblings at AN/I
Gavin.collins' Laws (cited by Hans Adler at [20]):
1. everything but a copyvio is automatically OR
2. even patching together copyvios is OR unless you copy most of the source
- Note: these laws seem to be, not Gavin's own words, but Hans' summary interpretation of his views, and therefore apply in interesting ways to themselves
anonymous law ([21]): Wikipedia is good for things that nobody cares about.
User:Daññy's Theory: A) Opportunity cost determines that impoverished users are far less likely to contribute to Wikipedia (for a multitude of reasons). B) The majority of the people in the world, particularly outside of western states, are impoverished. ∴ Wikipedia will always be heavily biased.
Corollary 1: This bias does not serve to determine and usefulness/uselessness of Wikipedia, but it must be observed.
Wikid77's Law: Wikipedia is 10% information and 90% deformation (re: Edison on "Genius"). Corollary: Wikipedia is 10% translation and 90% confrontation ([22]), with other users hating those translations.
North8000's Law: It's rare for a cite to both have a source that meets the letter of wp:rs criteria and where the source explicitly says what the material says. ([23])
Peter Jackson's summary of arbitration: Users Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin and Tojo are banned for making Wikipedia a battleground.
Kotniski's Second Law: rather as in real life, the "laws" are kept deliberately opaque – by and for the benefit of the lawyers ([24])
Alexandria's law: If an article can be deleted under G11, it's safe to say that it'll likely fall under G12.
Brambleberry of RiverClan's Law of Creation: Before you create an article, you must develop it in your sandbox before sending it in, especially with media, lest you end up with another stub article.
Corollary: If there is little information about a notable topic, such as with Bluetongue Lizard (mythology), you need not develop in your sandbox.
Brambleberry of RiverClan's Law of Deletion: When discussing at RfD, only place input if it is a topic you are familiar with or if you can tell it is complete nonsense.
Brambleberry of RiverClan's Law of Inclusion: When debating whether to add a fact to Wikipedia, check if the information appears somewhere in a serious non-fiction book, newspaper, or magazine.
Corollary: If there are no books, newspapers, or magazines readily available on the topic, you may check notable websites.
Brambleberry of RiverClan's Law of Standardization: A skeleton is a basic structure of a a certain topic, such as books. When writing an article about a book (in your sandbox of course), develop a skeleton before you begin to write.
Corollary: If there are some things with nothing, such as awards, you may either put that it has none or delete the section of the skeleton.
Brambleberry of RiverClan's Law of Stubs: It's perfectly acceptable to add three or four stub templates to an article to call attention to multiple groups of people.
Brambleberry of RiverClan's Law of the Department of Fun: The DoF has a serious purpose for everyone. It's your responsibility to weed out what serious purpose it has for you.
Brambleberry of RiverClan's Law of WikiProjects: It's perfectly acceptable to join six or seven WikiProjects that you'd be good at. In the process, you may discover WikiProjects that are best for you. (e.g., if you're in WikiProject Animals and WikiProject Media, join WikiProject Animals in media).
Brambleberry of RiverClan's Law of WikiBreaks: When you take a WikiBreak, you must make it a scheduled amount of time, lest you forget about editing Wikipedia altogether.
Corollary: If you intend to quit Wikipedia, do not set a scheduled amount of time.
Wer900's law: any attempt to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy without expanding the bureaucracy are invariably doomed to fail.
Corollary: Anyone expecting to change Wikipedia will invariably fail, unless the change is minor or if the person is a vandal.
Timbo's Rule No. 4: "Starting articles on Wikipedia is like building sandcastles on the beach. Down by the surf the sand is nice and wet and the building is easy, but your work will soon be wiped out by an incoming wave. For your work to last, build farther up the beach." Other rules at: Carrite's User Page.
Usergname's law: An article's ratio of grammar errors to words decreases with its length.
AGK's Law of Meta-processes: If one Wikipedia process is used to resolve a dispute about another Wikipedia process, the resulting discussion will be a waste of the community's time. Example: RFAR on MOSNUM; RFC on RFA. Processes are necessary evils, to be used for the administration of the encyclopedia. Process for the sake of process is unnecessary.
King jakob c2's law of vandals, vandalfighters, and writers: It's easier to destroy something than to maintain it, and easier to maintain something than to create something new. For proof, consider that there are around 2800 autopatrolled users, 6863 rollbackers, and tens of thousands of IPs that vandalize.
King jakob c2's law of this list of laws of Wikipedia: If you've actually read this far, you're probably a Wikipediaholic.
TransporterMan's First Law: Please do not disrupt the space-time continuum to make a point. First used here.
LazyBastardGuy's Law of Reliability: For every reliable source we include, there are at least ten that aren't and five that we can't tell either way.
LazyBastardGuy's Law of Time-Sensitive Material: There is absolutely no reason to use an {{update after}} tag. You can always always always fix whatever it would be used on, even if it just means updating the verb tense. It would take as much time as inserting the tag anyway, and would be infinitely more helpful to the project as a whole.
Pokéfan95's law: The more advanced the technology Wikipedia has, the higher the probability that a random old user will leave because Wikipedia is getting complicated.
HiB2Bornot2B's law: When a professor states unequivocally that Wikipedia should not be used for research, there's a pretty good chance the professor does not understand how editing works on Wikipedia. There is an even larger chance that they have never made a contribution.
IHeartMath&#124Jason13579 (talk)'s law: Making your username your IP address, or an IP address, usually isn't a good idea.
Mgasparin's Law: As a discussion on ANI gets longer, the probability that EEng will add a sarcastic comment or image approaches 1.

Raul's Brick O' Common Sense

The rarest, most sought after award on Wikipedia is Raul's Brick of Common Sense. It's like the Nobel Prize of Wikipedia Dynamics.

Awarded to	Comment(s) deserving of recognition	Reason
Calton	00:56, December 29, 2005 01:01, December 29, 2005 06:10, December 29, 2005	Trying to impart common sense into the clueless is a tough job, one which you do particularly well. As such, you get the very first of Raul's common sense bricks.
Radiant!	January 27, 2006	For imparting common sense into the clueless, I hereby award you this very rare wiki-award: Raul's brick of common sense.
Charles Matthews	February 11, 2006	"Regarding your [mailing list comment] – I'm giving you a double-rare award. First, I am giving you your own entry in Raul's laws – one I wish desperately I had thought of. I'm also giving you only the third-ever of Raul's Bricks of Common sense, for the same."
1/2 to Mikkalai and 1/2 67.20.18.127	18:15, March 29, 2006 and 19:37, March 29, 2006	For a biting deconstruction of the logical shell game used to support parapsychology
JzG	May 18, 2006	For a clear explanation to a vandal how the allocation of power works here
Bishonen	May 21, 2006	A mighty reply to a farewell message
Zoe	20:50, July 15, 2006 20:13, July 16, 2006 20:40, July 16, 2006	For biting commentary on the Village pump
David Gerard	February 21, 2007	For drawing insightful parallels to past situations (15:14, 21 February 2007 . . David Gerard (Talk – contribs – block) (Protected Wikipedia:Pedophiles: um, no. The pedophile wheel war is not meant to be an annual derby. [edit=sysop:move=sysop])
Chairboy	14:30, June 5, 2007
Dave souza	19:01, February 27, 2008

@@ Line 569: / Line 569: @@
 # [[User:HiB2Bornot2B|HiB2Bornot2B]]'s law: When a professor states unequivocally that Wikipedia should not be used for research, there's a pretty good chance the professor does not understand how editing works on Wikipedia. There is an even larger chance that they have never made a contribution.
 # [[User:Jason1357902|IHeartMath&#38;#124Jason13579]] ([[User talk:Jason1357902|talk]])'s law: Making your username your IP address, or ''an'' IP address, usually isn't a good idea.
+# [[User:Mgasparin|Mgasparin]]'s Law: As a discussion on ANI gets longer, the probability that [[user:EEng|EEng]] will add a sarcastic comment or image approaches 1.
 == Raul's Brick O' Common Sense ==

Revision as of 22:33, 30 November 2019

Raul's Laws of Wikipedia

Laws by others

Raul's Brick O' Common Sense

See also