Wikipedia:Lugo's law
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Lugo's law is: "As a discussion about images on Wikipedia's In The News section grows longer, the probability of someone posting a picture of Fernando Lugo with some attempt at humour approaches 1". It was originally stated by User:Bencherlite.[1]
Fernando Lugo is a politician who was elected President of Paraguay in 2008. The election result was featured with a blurb in the In The News section of the Main Page, accompanied by an image of Lugo speaking into a microphone. Over the following days, there were only a handful of new blurbs added to In The News, and none had suitable images available. Therefore Lugo's image remained on the Main Page uninterrupted from 21 April to 4 May 2008, a total of 13.5 days.
This feat of endurance sparked complaints and discussions on how to increase the frequency of ITN updates, especially images. The Lugo incident has frequently been referenced in discussions of images on the Main Page, including a Signpost article. The image has become an occasional meme among long-standing contributors to ITN, often being posted on discussion pages, hence the formulation of "Lugo's law".
The same image has been used again on the Main Page several times:
- It appeared in the "On This Day" section in 2010, in 2014 and in 2021.
- In 2012, it appeared again in ITN, to accompany a blurb about Lugo facing impeachment.
Is it Uribe's law now?
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Lugo's 13.5 day record was broken in August 2025, coincidentally by another photograph of a Latin American politician holding a microphone. The late Colombian senator Miguel Uribe Turbay appeared on the front page of Wikipedia for 17 days, from 14 August to 31 August. During this span of time, only two blurbs were posted — neither of which had a suitable image to replace Uribe — and ITN's editing community had gone ten consecutive days without agreeing to post anything at all. This resulted in editors discussing the photo's longevity as a symptom of what many consider to be flaws with the In The News posting process.
Uribe's record is complicated by the fact that his photograph was found to be a plausible copyright violation and deleted on 16 August, resulting in the ITN image being switched back to a photograph of Jim Lovell who died nine days earlier. However, the photo was switched back to Uribe the next day.
See also
[edit source]References
[edit source]- ^ Bencherlite (14 November 2012). "Talk:Main page". Wikipedia. Retrieved 15 November 2012.