Cunningham's Law

Cunningham's law holds that the fastest way to get a correct answer on the internet is not to ask a question but to post a wrong answer with confidence. Someone will arrive, irritated, to fix it.

The name is itself a small case of the phenomenon it describes: Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki, has said on record that he never actually said this. The label was applied by Steven McGeady, a former Intel colleague, who says he was recalling advice Cunningham gave him in the early 1980s about Usenet — so the name is demonstrably someone else's, while the provenance of the idea is exactly the thing in dispute, and the attribution has stuck harder than any correction has managed to dislodge it. That makes it a genuine puzzle of Provenance as much as a rule of behaviour.

The mechanism is an asymmetry of effort. Composing a correct answer from scratch means structuring an argument, hedging what you're unsure of, and anticipating objections. Correcting a wrong one requires none of that — the structure is already there, the error is usually obvious, and disagreement motivates more than a blank page does. A concrete, checkable claim gives a reader something to push against, the same quality that makes Falsifiability useful elsewhere; a vague open question gives them nothing to grab. It is the same low-friction economics that make a wiki work at all — see Commons-Based Peer Production — applied before a page even exists, rewarding exactly the incremental fix a good Backlink structure is built to surface later.

The uncomfortable edge is that the law describes a manipulation tactic as much as an observed regularity: deliberately posting something wrong to provoke a reply is not an accident of forum culture, it is a strategy, and it works precisely because it is cheaper to state in Plain Language a claim someone will want to correct than to write the correct answer yourself.