As an old story goes:
The little boy’s mother was going off to the market. She worried about her son, who was always up to some mischief. She sternly admonished him, “Be good. Don’t get into trouble. Don’t eat all the chocolate. Don’t spill all the milk. Don’t throw stones at the cow. Don’t fall down the well.” The boy had done all of these things on previous market days. Hoping to head off new trouble, she added, “And don’t stuff beans up your nose!” This was a new idea for the boy, who promptly tried it out.
In our zeal to head off others’ unwise actions, we may put forth ideas they have not entertained before. As the popular saying goes, “don’t give ’em any ideas”.
For example, if you are warning a vandal for one type of disruptive behavior, don’t be tempted to go further and warn them in advance against something else that you think they might try next. It may not have occurred to them until you told them about it.
In a similar vein, there are many areas of the encyclopedia that rely on, or benefit from, some level of security through obscurity, such as WP:SPI. For this reason, specific cases and abuse mitigation are often left undiscussed on-wiki, and this essay is sometimes cited in such situations (often using the shortcut WP:BEANS) to drop the hint that further public explanation of a matter could be unwise. An essay explaining this in more detail is Wikipedia:There’s a reason you don’t know.
See also
- Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:Don’t
- Wikipedia:Avoid instruction creep
- Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point
- Wikipedia:Don’t delete the main page
- Wikipedia:Don’t stuff beans up the developers’ noses
- Wikipedia:No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man
- A counterpoint to this essay
- Every time someone clicks this link, an innocent kitten, a person, a cow, a bat, a frog, a whale, a dolphin, an axolotl, and a tiger die. (not necessarily in that order)
Articles
- Negative suggestion
- “Beans in My Ears“, a 1960s song
- Reactance (psychology)
- Reverse psychology
- Security through obscurity
- Streisand effect
- Ostensive definition
- Pandora’s box
References
