[Wikimedia-l] Who invoked "principle of least surprise" for the image filter?

Nathan nawrich at gmail.com
Wed Jun 13 20:56:40 UTC 2012


Earliest I have it on a Wikimedia list is from WikiEn-L on 2/11/08 from Ian
Woollard (written as principle of least surprise), in the context of a
Muhammad images thread started by Jimbo -- but my logs only go back to the
summer of 07.

On-wiki, I see it being used in naming convention arguments for years, as
early as April 2005. I'm not sure when it made the transition from user
interface design principle to a more general content principle, but it
looks like (from a web search) it was commonly used for Ruby as early as
2002-2003.


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