I certainly agree with part of that. Before creating the poll thread, I asked you multiple times to please avoid flooding the poll thread with your own commentary, so that there would be room for other community members to have a discussion. If people want to scroll through endless discussions between you and me, they can always come and read through this thread.confocaloid wrote: ↑September 17th, 2023, 10:35 pmCreation of the poll is misleading. I do not consider the poll legitimate. Instead of creating even more and more scattered threads (misleading/diverting attention of community to irrelevant issues), it would be much more reasonable and productive to keep the discussion in a single place, and take into account already stated replies/opinions/feedback.
Your responses currently make up a majority of the posts on the poll thread, and definitely a majority of the length. This is exactly the kind of thing that a few people have mentioned as being problematic in previous threads -- it gave them a sense of being "drowned out", and therefore of not being able to participate usefully in the discussion. In the future, could you please try to keep your responses to a reasonable number and length in that thread?
As far as I can tell, I'm not ignoring any of those things. I've reviewed all of the discussion quite carefully, multiple times, and have considered all of the points that have come up. Unfortunately, most of the arguments that you've been repeating seem to be irrelevant to the basic issue of what word to use on the LifeWiki (and elsewhere) for "active object traveling through signal circuitry".confocaloid wrote: ↑September 17th, 2023, 10:35 pmYou are pretending that the whole set of issues can be reduced to a single choice regarding a single LifeWIki page. In reality, there are large-scale consequences across multiple pages. The content of the LifeWIki entry signal is not an isolated choice, but a part of a larger issue.
Life Lexicon lists words and phrases. LifeWiki aims to document knowledge in the form of articles about specific topics or concepts. You are ignoring this difference.
The word 'signal' is ambiguous, with several different meanings. You are essentially ignoring this.
More importantly, creation of this poll ignores that there was previous substantial discussion, in several forum threads and elsewhere. You are effectively discarding all the previous relevant discussion.
The poll acknowledges the fact that there's a reasonably simple binary choice between adjusting the definition of "signal" on the LifeWiki to match current usage, or leaving it the same. Of course there are "large-scale consequences across multiple pages" of either choice! But we either have to change the "signal" article, or not change it. Not surprisingly, my preference would be to make this one change in the "signal" article, and thereby avoid making changes to dozens of other pages and LifeWiki entries that I think are generally just fine the way they are.
Of course, if during the course of this discussion, most of the community has been silently agreeing with your plan of leaving the 2003 definition of "signal" in place, then I would definitely want to know that! The poll thread was an obvious step to take to try to gather more information. The results so far don't seem to indicate any kind of silent majority in favor of your idea.
By that you mean that the LifeWiki definition stayed the same. That's correct. However, the LifeWiki definition was incomplete even in 2003. It didn't account for regular pre-2003 uses of the term "signal" for the moving non-information-carrying signals in periodic signal sources and sinks. Signals that don't necessarily carry binary information, but that still move through signal circuitry in the Life universe, have become a lot more important in discussions in the last two decades.confocaloid wrote: ↑September 17th, 2023, 9:08 amThe definition of signal did in fact stay the same since 2003.
You are proposing to re-define signals in your preferred way.
It's perfectly possible for a LifeWiki definition to be reasonably adequate and correct in 2003, but to need an update twenty years later.
No, not at all -- your information-theory "confocaloid-signal" concept is a fine concept. It's just that if you try to exclude the "dvgrn-signal" sense, "confocaloid-signal" is not actually the primary, useful meaning of the term "signal" in a CA context. The current LifeWiki definition implies that it _is_ the primary meaning, so the LifeWiki definition needs to change. It should probably have been changed half a decade ago when all the other new signal-circuitry definitions went in -- that would probably have successfully avoided this whole lengthy discussion -- but that's just hindsight at this point.confocaloid wrote: ↑September 17th, 2023, 9:08 amThe existing definitions are still fine as they are. Just because the word is ambiguous, does not mean there is anything wrong about the concept.