Last week I came across Godwin's Law. Many of you may already be familiar with it. For those of you who aren't, Godwin's Law, according to wikipedia, states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

To test this law I wrote a little program to look at comments in the drupal database that contains the Linux Journal web content. The script first gets all the distinct article ids (nids in drupal speak) from the comments table where the comment includes one of the key words. Then it gets a count of the number of comments for each article, sorts the list, and outputs the count along with the article title.

Here's the script:





#!/bin/bash source mysqlpwd.sh echo "<table border=\"1\">" echo "<thead>" echo "<tr><th># Comments</th><th>Article Title</th></tr>" echo "</thead>" echo "<tbody>" mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p $MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \ -e "SELECT DISTINCT nid FROM comments WHERE comment LIKE '%hitler%' OR comment LIKE '%nazi%'" | while read nid do if [[ $nid ! = 'nid' ]] ; then count = $( mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p $MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \ -e "SELECT COUNT(*) AS cnt FROM comments WHERE nid = $nid" ) count = $( echo ${ count /cnt/ }) printf "%d\t%d

" $count $nid fi done | sort --numeric --reverse | while read count nid do t = $( mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p $MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \ -e "select title from node where nid = $nid" ) t = $( echo ${ t /title/ }) printf "<tr><td>%d</td><td><a href=\"/node/%d\">%s</a></td></tr>

" $count $nid "$t" done echo "</tbody>" echo "</table>"

Here's the output:





For comparison we need to get a list of articles that contain a large number of comments but that do not contain the keywords. Now we look at each article, then we check to see if it has any comments that contain the keywords. If it does not then we count the number of comments and output the article if the associated discussion was long. I arbitrarily chose 100 as the minimum number of comments needed for a discussion to be classified as long.

Here's the script:





#!/bin/bash source mysqlpwd.sh echo "<table border=\"1\">" echo "<thead>" echo "<tr><th># Comments</th><th>Article Title</th></tr>" echo "</thead>" echo "<tbody>" mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p $MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \ -e "SELECT nid FROM node" | while read nid do if [[ $nid ! = 'nid' ]] ; then count = $( mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p $MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \ -e "SELECT COUNT(*) as cnt FROM comments WHERE nid = $nid AND (comment LIKE '%hitler%' OR comment LIKE '%nazi%')" ) count = $( echo ${ count /cnt/ }) if [[ $count -eq 0 ]] ; then count = $( mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p $MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \ -e "SELECT COUNT(*) AS cnt FROM comments WHERE nid = $nid" ) count = $( echo ${ count /cnt/ }) if [[ $count -gt 100 ]] ; then printf "%d\t%d

" $count $nid fi fi fi done | sort --numeric --reverse | while read count nid do t = $( mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p $MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \ -e "select title from node where nid = $nid" ) t = $( echo ${ t /title/ }) printf "<tr><td>%d</td><td><a href=\"/node/%d\">%s</a></td></tr>

" $count $nid "$t" done echo "</tbody>" echo "</table>"

Here's the output:





Can we conclude anything about the validity of Godwin's Law from this? Ahhh, I dunno.

p.s. File this under blather #2.