User:Extreme Unction/Rules, Laws, and Other Observations

Raul654 has a page of laws. I got a couple of mine added to his list, and suggested another. But I keep thinking of new laws to add, and I keep thinking that maybe I should start my own page rather than continually tugging at Raul's sleeve asking him to include mine on his page.

So I did.

So there.

Extreme Unction's Laws

 * 1) Extreme Unction's First Law: If enough people act independently towards the same goal, the end result is indistinguishable from a conspiracy.
 * 2) *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.
 * 3) *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.
 * 4) *Corollary: The people who most need to understand this law and its corollaries never will.
 * 5) 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.
 * 6) *Corollary: No matter how obviously disruptive and/or useless a given individual may be, any sufficiently large online community will always have at least one person willing to defend that individual's actions.
 * 7) Extreme Unction's Third Law: For every reason provided to explain why valuable long-term editors/admins are leaving Wikipedia, there is an equal and opposite reason which has been, or will be, provided by someone else to explain the same phenomenon.
 * 8) Extreme Unction's Fourth Law: Providing some people access to reasonable anonymity and a near-total lack of consequence for their actions will have the same effect on them as would providing a case of tequila to a college football team.