Cunningham's Law

A quiet question in a busy channel often dies on the scroll. A confident wrong claim draws ten replies before lunch. Forums, Stack Overflow threads, and internal chat all show the same tilt. People like to fix assertions more than they like to volunteer answers from a cold start.

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.

That line is what the internet calls Cunningham’s Law. Meta-Wiki’s summary credits Steven McGeady with naming it after Ward Cunningham, the programmer who built the first wiki. McGeady said in a 2010 comment on a New York Times blog (quoted on Meta-Wiki) that Cunningham gave him that advice in the early 1980s about what became Usenet, then watched the idea generalize to the wider web. So the honorific points at Cunningham, but the catchy formulation and the label came from McGeady’s retelling, not from a signed theorem on Cunningham’s desk.

Wikipedia’s biography of Cunningham adds the awkward footnote. Cunningham has pushed back on the version everyone pastes. The article quotes him calling the line a misquote that disproves itself by spreading online, and says he denies ever recommending that people fish for facts by posting deliberate wrong answers. If you care about attribution, treat the pull quote as a folk law about forum dynamics, not as a faithful excerpt of Cunningham’s public teaching.

The behavior underneath still shows up everywhere you have reputation, speed, and a bias toward visible mistakes. It also skews who you hear from. The 90-9-1 principle is the participation curve behind that loud correction reflex. Stack Overflow rewards fast correction of bad snippets. Old bulletin boards flamed the confident newbie and sometimes educated them in the same breath. Company Slack is gentler on the surface, but the same reflex appears when someone states a release date wrong and three engineers appear with calendars. None of that requires you to adopt bad faith as a strategy. It is enough to notice why a thinly researched strong claim can outperform a polite question for engagement, and to decide when you want signal instead of theater.

I use the name as shorthand for the correction reflex, not as permission to waste a community’s time. If you need an answer, lead with what you tried, link the smallest repro you can, and invite edits. If you are wrong in public, say so when the thread educates you. The internet will still behave like the internet. You do not have to optimize for the worst version of it.