Been having a meddle with this page and have a couple of queries that I'd like to check about before I go ahead and start butchering text.
First, IIRC the "witch bobbing" technique was a form of trial by ordeal that was older than the ducking stool rather than an evolution from it. Should this be moved to a page on trial by ordeal? You couldn't really bob someone with a ducking stool as they would stay down as long as the chair did - you could, however, torture them into confessing by repeated partial drownings or, in the spirit of the original punishment, use it as corporal punishment for a social misdemeanour (minor maleficium and/or the threat thereof or some degree of heresy).
Secondly the ducking stool/cucking stool paragraph gets more confusing each time I read it:
The ducking stool should not be confused with the cucking stool, as the later involves merely humiliation, and not water. If the authorities are feeling lenient, however, most ducking stools could be used sans water. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that perhaps the term ducking was intended as a play on words - it sounds like cucking, but invokes an image of water foul, and considering that cucking means defecation in Middle English, foul it is indeed.
By using the ducking stool sans water, do we mean leaving someone tied to it like a set of stocks, without dunking them? What is the play on words? We've established that a cucking stool is basically a commode to which someone is tied to exhibit them, are we suggesting that the ducking stool could be used to dunk someone in a sewer?
It's been years since I wrote the paragraph in question, but I suspect the confusion is because of a typo. The first instance of "foul" was meant to be "fowl".
I've long since moved and am no longer sure where my copy of Curious Punishments (the book I cited in the bibliography entry) is, so I can't reference it to be sure… but I think the original book talked about the ducking stool sometimes being used more as a threat: Tie the victim to seat, and hoist them out over the water to let fear of heights and the prospect of being dunked scare the crap out of them. I was not suggesting anyone be dunked in a sewer. I'll go in and fix the typo.
As I type that, it occurs to me that might be where some of the problem comes as well. You may be picturing just a chair, that gets dropped in the water, I guess, based on your statement that you can't bob them and they'd stay down as long as the chair did. Most of the illustrations in the book I referenced showed it as a chair on a long wooden arm and a pivot. So the operators, standing on dry land, could repeatedly dunk the person tied to the chair. If you click on the wikipedia link, you'll see plenty of illustrations of a ducking stool on a boom arm which certainly could seesaw or bob somebody in and out of the water.
Speaking of wikipedia: that wiki now asserts that there's no connection between a ducking stool and the whole "if she's a witch she floats" thing. I don't have the book handy, so I can't really refute that. So I may just cut that whole witch paragraph, or move parts of it to Trial by Ordeal as you suggest.
And one more wikipedia thing: that place says the cucking stool terminology is NOT derived from cuckold. So that footnote you added might not be accurate.
And a little rant tangential to that: I really hate the footnotes code on wikidot. I'll often skim longer articles, and then get to the bottom and see something interesting in the footnotes. Trying to look back up the page to see where that footnote is buried and what it pertains to is a pain in the butt. Editing a page with footnotes in it is also really unnecessarily tricky. You want to edit a sentence, but it's broken up with nested brackets and sometimes multiple inserted sentences in between the words you're trying to edit. My reluctance to use the footnotes code is at least as great as your reluctance to use the bibliography code to cite your sources, Colonel. Now I'm just rambling. I should go make that typo fix and move the paragraph.
Thanks for getting back to me - I didn't want to get too aggressive with the article without knowing what the original author meant.
As for bib code - I've never been able to get it to work.