Redirects and categories discussion thread

[confocaloid]

The name 'Christmas Life' is incorrectly capitalized in
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=139468
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no

The name 'EightLife' is incorrectly capitalized in
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no

The name 'HighLife' is incorrectly capitalized in
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no

I think those redirects should be deleted, as misspellings.

[hotdogPi]

There's no reason to delete misspellings if they're likely to occur.

[confocaloid]

One problem is that a redirect from a misspelling incorrectly suggests that it might be a valid alternate spelling. In other words, such redirects are misleading.

Another problem is that (for example) typing "Eight" in the "Search LifeWiki" box displays a drop-down list, where "EightLife" (correct), "Eightlife" (incorrect) and "Eight Life" (incorrect) are all visible. This is clutter, and there is no indication which spelling is the correct one.

And of course creating lots of redirects for their own sake / preemptively "just in case" does not make much sense.

[TYCF]

Sorry for creating them.

[dvgrn]

Does anyone have an opinion on redirects like "Christmas Life" -> "OCA:Christmas Life" (once the capitalization is corrected)?

There are certainly a number of rules that have seen a lot of discussion -- "HighLife" and so on -- where a redirect from the main namespace into the OCA namespace seems perfectly fine. But it seems possible to go overboard here also and create a lot of clutter, e.g., if we had a redirect for every rule that LifeViewer has an alias for.

In the case of "Christmas Life", LifeViewer presumably gives it that alias because of the "Christmas Life" thread from 2011... which has three posts in it. It looks like muzik picked up that name in one of the big sweeps adding LifeViewer aliases, a while back.

There's also a note by wwei that that rule is (also? more commonly? not clear) known as "H-trees". The rule got discussed but not named well before 2011. Here's calcyman from 2009, in a discussion about a chapter by David Eppstein from a previous book of articles collected by Andrew Adamatzky:

The fractal structure that results from the rule B1/S012345678 is the pattern that results from an aerial view of the Sierpinski pyramid.

Three posts, plus maybe a few mentions since 2011, doesn't rise anywhere near the level of "a lot of discussion" for me, so it doesn't seem like "Christmas Life" really needs a main-namespace redirect. If we leave this one in, how many more probably non-notable name redirects might we end up accidentally adding?

[confocaloid]

Does anyone have an opinion on redirects like "Christmas Life" -> "OCA:Christmas Life" (once the capitalization is corrected)?

Some Catagolue pages about rules link to main namespace redirects. For example https://catagolue.hatsya.com/census/b36s23 links to HighLife which redirects to OCA:HighLife.
I think it would be an improvement if those pages linked directly into the OCA namespace. (Similarly, whenever possible, any new links should link directly to the correct namespace, instead of relying on cross-namespace redirects.)
A reason why this is preferred is that a single title may refer to completely different topics, depending on whether the context is CGoL only or cellular automata in general. The main namespace redirect might lead to a different article, or it might lead to a disambiguation page.
For example, Eppstein redirects (correctly!) to David Eppstein, while OCA:Eppstein redirects to OCA:B35/S236.

(In this particular example, I think the redirect OCA:Eppstein should be deleted, and all the incoming links (Special:WhatLinksHere/OCA:Eppstein) should be reverted back to the rulestring-based pagename. The rule was originally investigated by at least two people, not just one.)
EDIT by dvgrn, 16 Dec 2023: have reverted these six pages.

[confocaloid]

Some redirects to sections are broken (lead to a non-existent section). I'm not sure if there is a good way to search for those.
An example [s]is[/s] was Periodic reflector (the section is named "Periodic reflectors" rather than "Periodic reflector" so the redirect [s]is[/s] was broken).

Edit: is -> was.

[confocaloid]

https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... tart=&end=
Seems to fall into the significant clutter without actual benefits category. Are all of those redirects needed? Why they are needed?

[confocaloid]

https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... tart=&end=
Seems to fall into the significant clutter without actual benefits category. Are all of those redirects needed? Why they are needed?

I think the same questions can be asked about categories:
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?targ ... tributions
Are all of those categories needed? Why those categories are considered useful (as opposed to being nearly useless clutter)?

Both redirects and categories are supposed to be secondary. The primary way of documenting existing knowledge is to write human-readable articles about notable topics (i.e. concepts, patterns, CA rules, ...)