Talk:Law of triviality/Archives/2012

want to refer
I really want to refer to Wikipedia itself in this article! :) —Quarl (talk) 2006-02-20 11:33Z 


 * Using "A nuclear power plant" as the example of something that can get easily approved is ironic, no? At least in the US. 22 March 2006 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.27.13.231 (talk • contribs)
 * I guess in the US a better example would be F-22 Raptor. —Quarl (talk) 2006-03-22 05:31Z 


 * On that I've changed it to a more general example (Given you don't have to fool with international treatys to get bridge-building capabilities). 68.39.174.238 01:07, 6 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Shouldn't the title be Colour of the bikeshed? raptor 12:09, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It could be, but now that it's "color" it shouldn't be changed; see WP:MOS. —Quarl (talk) 2006-10-09 18:57Z 


 * NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You try that on an ambiguous page like this and you'll let of a riot! 68.39.174.238 04:29, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Or more to the point, start a lame page move war over the spelling of the title, and get this article listed at WP:LAME. Would be really ironic if it wouldn't be pointy now I have suggested it. Carcharoth 19:41, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Color is listed at "color", not colour. We should keep the no-U spelling to stay consistent with that article, plus the page that Quarl pointed out. --Idont Havaname (Talk) 17:59, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Two of the three external links, and doubtless Parkinson, used colour; we should too. The first rule on Anglo-American differences is "use the spelling appropriate to the subjec;" which comes even before "Leave it alone." Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:39, 25 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Maybe we could coin a new proverb: "The spelling of the colo(u)r of the bikeshed" referring to discussions that are even lamer than discussing the painting of a building. ;-) --PeR 06:41, 26 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I completely fail to see how British spelling is appropriate to this "subjec". 68.39.174.238 04:01, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
 * And ofcourse now we're down to one external link. 68.39.174.238 04:02, 22 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Presumably, because the originator and (re-)populariser of phrase (Parkinson, and Poul-Henning Kamp) both used the British spelling. Alai 20:36, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Parkinson doesn't talk about the color but costs
In Parkinson's original book the discussion is in the Financial Committee (the chapter is title "High Finance").


 * First item is a reactor for 10 million USD, no one objects, it's approved.
 * Second item is a bike shed for $2350: great debate whether the roof should be made out of asbestos, aluminium or galvanized iron to cut costs. They talk for 45 minutes and eventually save $300.
 * Third item is the refreshments served at the Joint Welfare Comittee meeting: $4.75 monthly. They debate for 1 hour and 15 minutes and postpone the decision until the next meeting.

I'm aware that in the OSS world it was popularized by the FreeBSD mail where it is described differently, but I think it's worth clarifying this for the readers.

Cheers, nyenyec &#9742; 19:13, 20 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually, the point is neither color nor costs but the use of time in a wasteful manner. No time is spent or wasted on the first item as no one on the Committee knows anything about reactors. No one is expected to know anything about reactors or their construction.
 * The members of the Committee spend 45 minutes on the bike shed because each member knows something about some phase of the construction of a bike shed. I seem to remember that Parkinson made the point that, in this case, each member of the Committee feels that he is expected to know something about the construction of a bike shed.
 * The members of the Committee spend the longest time on the third item because every member does know something about refreshments, has opinions about refreshments and can make up for previous lack of participation by making and stressing points here.
 * The parallel to WP editors is obvious. JimCubb 21:02, 11 October 2007 (UTC)


 * There's an irony here: OSS software doesn't involve costs, Parkinson's example definitely does -- the Law of Triviality is phrased in terms of costs, in fact. Parkinson might have been using cost as a proxy for complexity, which -- until OSS, arguably -- it generally was, and still is. Yakushima (talk) 07:47, 23 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Why do believe that open source software does not involve cost? Of course it involves cost and finite resources.  They are just not expressed in monetary terms.  (Matthias)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.200.22.2 (talk) 17:23, 11 June 2010 (UTC)


 * You may want to check that. As I recall the story, there is one person on the committee who knows things about reactors and is rather skeptical against this one, but chooses not to object because objections would not be well received. 81.231.33.217 (talk) 10:24, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Pee in it
Some people have more of a bike-shed-arguing nature than others. One expression I've heard for such people is, "He doesn't like the soup until he's had a chance to pee in it." In other words, this person thinks that any effort (no matter how trifling) requires his personal contribution -- even if others regard that contribution as both unnecessary and harmful.

This is sometimes heard of newspaper editors, managers, and others who may review or approve another's work: a writer submitting an article for editorial review may be encouraged by his peers to put an obvious error in it, so that the editor has something to catch and fix. This lets the editor feel that he is making a contribution, without imperiling the parts of the article that are written in good faith. --FOo 04:42, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

"Repopularized"? Was it ever popular? Is it actually popular now?
The article currently says that the phrase was REpopularized in a discussion on a list devoted to one of the less popular open source OSes, and has since appeared in Wiki discussions, etc.

I think it should be made clear that the phrase is popular (so far, anyway) only within certain user communities.

As for whether it was REpopularized -- well, I've been looking around (Google News Archives, Google Scholar, Google Books, Amazon book searches). I think the idea gained some currency in the terms Parkinson originally used: The Law of Triviality. However, when I search on "bikeshed", "bike shed" and "bicycle shed" in sources that had reached print after Parkinson's Law was published, with very few exceptions, I don't see the terms used in a proverbial "colo[u]r of bikeshed" sense. These exceptions are are from (or for) nuclear engineers, or from those writing on management topics. It appears that, at best, any *proverbial* "bikeshed" or "colo[u]r of bikeshed" has hopped from one specialist community to another, but was never really the popular way to talk about the phenomenon Parkinson was lampooning.

Google Scholar:
 * "... The letter went on to ask about the inevitable bicycle shed, an item of expenditure not criticised in the MMC report, that amounted to about 0.2 per cent of ..." Efficiency audit and public enterprise: Problems and options, 1982


 * "... a common task; their consulting together cannot be interpreted as a cabal; the task relates to the key issues; it discourages the 'bicycle-shed, syndrome' ..." The Politics of Management: the Corporate Governance Issue, 1986


 * "Polytechnic procurements are subject to the rigours of local government finance and bicycle-shed politics ...." Staying afloat—a collective enterprise, 1989, ACM publication


 * "... it has the inherent feature that everybody can talk about it, like the proverbial 'color of the bicycle shed' with no clear result." "On the methodology of Engineering Geodesy", in 2007

This is it for "bicycle shed" on Google Scholar. All other apparent Law of Triviality uses of "bicycle shed", "bike shed" or "bikeshed" seem to involve a brief *explanation* of Parkinson's joke, one way or another. And even the above examples (because they are snippets, with context behind pay-view walls) might be amplified for clarity where I can't see it. By comparison, "Law of Triviality" nets me 22 hits on Google Scholar.

If there is a proverbial bicycle shed, then according to Google Scholar, it's a place for illicit activity, usually juvenile, usually sexual, as in "behind the bicycle shed" (a British usage, I think.) More obscurely, among architects and architecture critics, there is alluding to an infamous comment of Nikolaus Pevsner's comparing a bicycle shed to a cathedral.

When I Google (Web) on "colo[u]r of the [bike shed|bikeshed|bicycle shed]", (only about six or seven hundred hits total) a very large number of uses refer to, or link to, or explain the phrase (and one way or another, almost all seem to tie back to the BSD mailing source and/or this Wikipedia article). If the phrase has been "REpopularized", and has become "proverbial", why would those who use it see any such need for explication? Law of Triviality gets over 2000 hits -- most of them with explications, but I don't think anybody's claiming the law is proverbial; at least not as proverbial as Parkinson's Law itself.

Google News Archive search on "colo[u]r of the [bike shed|bikeshed|bicycle shed]": NOTHING. This is for a phrase supposedly "repopularized" on the Web? It seems highly unlikely it was ever popular, and it hardly even seems popular except on a few software forums. By comparison, "Law of Triviality" gets over a dozen hits on Google News Archive searches, and I wouldn't claim that it was "popular" or "proverbial" on that statistic alone.

Note that I'm not arguing against the phrase, or against its notability. I just think there's an overblown claim of past and present popularity, and of "proverbiality" here. But of course, I'm just going on and on about almost nothing, because this is so trivial. ;-) Yakushima (talk) 07:32, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Interesting observations but probably violates NOR
This paragraph is probably better sited here on the talk page. As somebody pointed out at AfD, this observation is unsourced with respect to Parkinson's bicycle shed example. Spinality (talk) 06:03, 15 July 2008 (UTC)


 * A related idea is William James's well-known aphorism "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." An issue with lives hanging in the balance can clarify and polarize opinions, prompting disputants to set aside petty politics with an eye to the greater good; but with a trivial issue, on which each viewpoint is equally valid, and equally meaningful or meaningless, endless conflict can result – with egos becoming more significant than outcomes. Winning the debate is more important than solving the problem at hand. Another explanation is offered by Maynard Smith's observation that larger animals usually limit conflicts to elaborate displays of power while much smaller and apparently docile ones (such as pigeons) do engage in fierce fighting that frequently leads to death.

Colour rather than color
Kamp's initial email includes the spelling "colour". The title of the initial email was given incorrectly in the article, I have linked to the original email but would point out that Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project also verifies this spelling and title on page 261. I appreciate this is a thorny issue since the later iterations utilise "color", but since the original iteration used "colour", I feel we are bound by that usage. Hence my changes to the article where appropriate. I have not amended one external link because that again is the actual title of the page. I think common sense may dictate that we simply have to allow different spellings in this article, since we should not change the spellings in original quotations or titles of works. Hiding T 09:39, 25 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Agreed. This is more logical for a number of reasons. I've completed the transition to UK English. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 10:35, 25 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Since the article is about a law written by a UK author (C Northcote Parkinson), it is appropriate that the article be in UK English. The only exceptions are within the text of references that are themselves spelled a different way.  That's strict adherence to WP:ENGVAR.  --Athol Mullen (talk) 12:40, 26 July 2008 (UTC)


 * You all owe me a new irony meter. My old one just exploded.  ;-) — DragonHawk (talk|hist) 15:24, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Bikeshedding
Shouldn't the article also mention the verb "Bikeshedding", which at least among FreeBSD users and developers have become a word to describe situations when bikeshed-like discussions arise? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.209.166.130 (talk) 09:39, 25 September 2008 (UTC)


 * ✅ --Kvng (talk) 03:04, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Opening paragraphs
I think the opening paragraphs could be expanded. They don't really provide full context or an understanding of the subject. ChildofMidnight (talk) 22:35, 19 June 2009 (UTC)


 * ✅ --Kvng (talk) 03:22, 3 February 2011 (UTC)