Talk:Godwin's law/Archive 2

message: I am surprised that you want to keep the unnamed-links, I'm pretty sure that this is against Wikipedia guidelines, although I understand the preference to remove the plethora of footnotes. Are you sure that no formatting links would be an improvement, or that citing examples outside of Usenet is irrelevant?  Cheers, Wragge 20:20, 2005 Jun 8 (UTC)
:I don't think the earlier incarnations of the entry violated Wikipedia guidelines.  I'm not saying that citing examples outside of Usenet is irrelevant -- only that *some critical judgment* should be applied to what to include, and that the "External Links" place is where you ought to list extraneous stuff, if at all.  I note that you have been studying Godwin's Law and its history and culture for a month.  It's something I've been studying for 15 years (the phenomenon of Godwin's Law long ago escaped my control, and it is only to preserve history that I even engage in this discussion here), that I first summarized 11 years ago, and that has taken on a life of its own since.  (I give a further account of it in my book, CYBER RIGHTS, copyright 1998, 2003.)
:Like many cultural phenomena, Godwin's Law has the capability of generating a certain mythology.  Historiographers should not merely repeat every myth, however, but instead should do research that penetrates to the facts behind the myth.  Imagine what the Encyclopedia Britannica would be like if every entry included every false idea about the subject matter in question. You should be asking yourself, before you screen-scrape some meme that has circulated around Usenet and the Web, how it is that you know it is true.  I have the small advantage that I was actually there, but even so I make a point of citing to reliable sources where possible.  By the same token, I make a point of excluding unreliable sources.  That's why Sexton (and Van der Leun, and others) ought to stay in the entry (they actually knew me when I was creating and spreading the meme "Godwin's Law"), and why Rich Rosen (no connection to me, never spoke to me, and his materials, if they ever existed, cannot be found now) should be excluded.  Frankly, I don't even have evidence that "Rich Rosen" ever existed.  It's as if someone were to insert the Easter Bunny into your family tree.  (Texture may show up here and say I'm too emotionally involved in the question of whether I'm related to the Easter Bunny to comment -- that will be fun.)  --Mike
Just to clear things up:
# Hi Mike. This is Rich Rosen. I do exist. Reports of my non-existence have been greatly exaggerated—perhaps most vociferously by those who wish I didn't, but indeed I do exist, and could probably prove this in a non-rigorous fashion if required.
# The "Rules of Net.Debate" also do exist. A transcript (because that's all that's left) can be found here. Yes, in a fascinating display of incompleteness, Google's archives show all the followups to this article but not the original article. Conspiracy theories regarding this can and should be routed to the appropriate place. However, the statement that "it's more likely that the prevalence of Godwin's Law predates any prevalence of the mythical (sic) Rosen's Rules of Net Debate" is proven to be incorrect simply by subtracting 1984 from 1990 and obtaining a positive number as a result.
# I thought I'd read someone mentioning "Rule #4" in my list; you will note in reading this transcript that there was no Rule #4. All the rules were marked Rule #1. Perhaps I thought that was funny at the time, perhaps this was an inversion on an old Monty Python joke, or perhaps this was a comment on how these "rules" were all equally important. Quizás quizás quizás. This was 1984 we're talking about. I'm lucky I remember what happened ten minutes ago.
# More importantly to this discussion, you will note in reading this transcript that there is no mention of Mike Godwin, his law (at least in part because it hadn't been concocted yet), Richard Sexton, his axiom (ditto), Nazis, Hitler, or anything/anyone else in particular. These were general descriptive statements about how Usenet discussions often went, as I think Godwin's and Sexton's comments were also intended.
Maybe I was the first to "codify" and compile such a list in an online forum, but naturally this was never intended to be a comprehensive proscriptive canon for online behavior. Perhaps this led some people later on to make a connection between my compilation and Godwin's Law, retroactively associating the two. 
In any case, the citation correlating my list and Mike's law is ubiquitous on the web, as that same text from the Net.Legends FAQ (agreed, the author probably erroneously recalled an association) is reproduced everywhere—just like Howard Rheingold's comment that "You can simply choose to not see any postings from Rich Rosen" as an example (in an article he wrote) of how killfiles work. So it goes.
The bottom line is, I posted my "rules" in 1984, and was long gone from Usenet as a prominent participant by the time Mike first proposed Godwin's law. It existed independently of my set of "rules" and has no association with it other than the erroneous citation that there is an association between them… which sort of forms an association between them, I guess, at some meta-memetic level.
: (It seems to me that the persistent persistence of any "myths" about such associations are worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedic entry on a subject, if only to say "X is frequently erroneously associated with Y owing to...", but perhaps that's just my opinion and a step backwards on the road to the egoless memeticism we should all aspire to.) 
The thing I find disturbing in all of this is Mike's overzealous eagerness to disassociate and distance himself and his law from the name of Rich Rosen, to the point of asserting that I don't even exist. Is my reputation that awful, Mike, that you would vote me out of existence just to avoid being associated with me? Or is "I don't even have evidence that 'Rich Rosen' ever existed" (with quotes around my name and everything!) supposed to be the countermeme to "We are ALL Rich Rosen"? :-)
No matter, the point may be that if you look hard enough on the Internet for a connection between two unrelated things, you will find it.
Anyone calling this Rosen's Law should be summarily shot.
Rich Rosen 02:39, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Style 

message: Looks like people are continuing to add in some corrolaries in order to make a political point. (Saw a few different cases in the history) We might want to keep an eye on that. --Wahooker 15:00, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some Political Commentary popping up in the Corrolaries. 

message: If the subject is Heinlein or homosexuality, the probability of a Hitler/Nazi comparison being made becomes equal to 1 (i.e. certainty)
:Just a comment: Heinlein and Hitler shared the same base personality type (probably very similar on minor variations as well).  24.22.227.53 07:56, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Case's Corollary 

message: The probability that ANY particular topic may come up in any particular thread approaches one as time passes-- is this supposed to be interesting?
Of course.. any such "law" is completely unfalsifiable; one could point to a billion post thread with no mention of Nazis (or whatever else) and I'm sure the response would be "The probability is merely approaching one-- it simply hasn't reached it yet."
: Agreed. Substitute immature sexual references for Nazi or Hitler references and the increased probability would be so bleeding obvious that we'd call it common sense and not a law. Robert John Kaper 13:25, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  eh 

message: :Some would argue, however, that Godwin's Law applies especially to the situation mentioned above, as it portrays an inevitable appeal to emotion as well as holding an implied ad hominem attack on the subject being compared, both of which are fallacious in irrelevant contexts. Hitler, on a semiotic level, has far too many negative connotations associated with him to be used as a valid comparison to anything besides other despotic dictators. Thus, Godwin's law holds even in making comparisons to normal leaders that, on the surface, would seem to be a reasonable comparison.
I think the above paragraph is inappropriately placed, shouldn't we move it? As a side note, another interpretation of Goodwin's law is that it decreases the chances people will consider the possibility the internet (and elsewhere) is rampant with a "nazi-esque" level of propaganda and/or be less likely to investigate or take seriously any theory that alleges something even remotely "sinister", but that interpretation could be wrong. zen master T 20:46, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Note: I retitled that section to "Debate and controversy" though it may still need cleaning up. zen master T 23:05, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why is there a counter counter argument in the counter argument section? 

message: I had a glance at the article, and thought the following note a bit odd:
"Godwin's Law is not meant to describe situations in which Hitler or Nazis could reasonably be expected to be mentioned, such as a discussion of Germany in World War II."
Given that the exact definition of Godwin's law is that Hitler or the Nazi party becomes more likely to be mentioned as a discussion continues, one would expect that these would be the discussions in which the probability approached one most rapidly. Presumably the author of this note intended to refer to the tradition of ending a thread once they are mentioned, but (as is noted in the introduction) since this is not actually part of the law, this note probably either needs to be edited for clarity or removed. 
Of course, being new to this whole editing business, I figured I'd check other people's opinions before hacking away at it myself. Thoughts?
ZombieWomble 13:36, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I see your point and will do some touch-up on the wording. --BRossow 20:19, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  An erroneous note? 

message: I know this isn't Godwin's Law but this article links to that article.  But on that article and, from what I've seen, that article only, the article's actual content pops up for a split second before the only thing shown is then the background image.  It seems to be a corrupt article (even getting the Edit link from the article page's HTML source and using that, it's still a blank page showing nothing but Wikipedia's background image).  I've no idea what to do here, so I'll just give a heads up and hope an admin sees this.
Also, I just checked something, and appears fine in Konqueror and not Firefox (1.0.6).  It's still peculiar, since that's the only article doing it.  --I am not good at running 03:15, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The page in question renders perfectly fine in Firefox 1.5 (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5) for me. --BRossow 04:04, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reducto ad Hitlerum article appears to be somewhat broken (not rendering in Firefox) 

message: Should'nt the name be Godwins Law, without the apostrophe? Pyramide 12:54, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No. The guy's name is "Godwin." --Grouse 14:33, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: And if his name was Godwins, the title would be Godwins' Law or even Godwins's Law. --BRossow 14:38, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

text: With all due respect, NO, though based on your own entry I'm wondering if this is a joke.  Gramatical ... should'nt ... unnecessary comma ...  Aargh! --BRossow 14:37, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, it is not a joke. I do not speak enlish as my first language, and therefore I might make errors when writing in a hurry. When the letter S i placed after a noun it is called genitive. when there is an apostrophe between teh noun and the S, the apostrophe is used in stead of an vocal. Eksample: Godwin's Law actually means Godwin is law. Pyramide 16:39, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't know you weren't a native English speaker, so no disrespect intended in my previous comment. In English, the -'s is an enclitic, in this case showing that Godwin's Law belongs to or came from Godwin.  Without the apostrophe, adding -s to the end of a noun in English makes the noun plural.  The only exception is the possessive its, as in The dog grabbed its bone and ran away.  (The word it's is a contraction of it is.) --BRossow 20:18, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

text: With no disrespect intended, given the many mechanical mistakes in your own contributions to this discussion, and your lack of experience with the English language, I don't think that pointing out what you think are grammatical errors in the English Wikipedia is the best way for you to make a contribution here.--Grouse 15:57, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gramatical error in title 

message: Doesn't originate with me, but I thought it appropriate.
"In situations where a valid comparison to Nazism can in fact be made, the validity of the comparison is directly proportional to the likelihood that Godwin's Law will be invoked in an attempt to invalidate it." - Randal Hayes Jr. 206.114.20.121 16:49, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hayes' Corollary