Next steps on getting back to normal editing for OCA:tlife

[Haycat2009]

Protecting the T life page is a little overboard just to stop one or two editors, as it prevents more productive edits from taking place. I suggest giving a partial block (For only the t life page) to those that have caused the most chaos in the edit war, instead of protecting it and not allowing anyone to edit.

EDIT by dvgrn: I've moved this post and responses to it out of the Edit War Reporting Thread.

That thread is meant for self-reporting new edit wars that have started up, not for long discussions of any particular issue. Those discussions should find their way onto some separate dedicated thread on the LifeWiki Discussion Board -- like this one.

EDIT by Sokwe: This thread has a large number of rule violations (especially rule 1 violations) that were not really acted on by the moderators at the time. When reviewing this thread, I chose to leave most of these violations in place. To anyone reading this at a later date, do not take the posts in this thread as examples of acceptable behavior.

The thread has been locked and this discussion is finished. Please do not quote potential rule-violating content from this thread elsewhere on the forums.

[confocaloid]

Protecting the T life page is a little overboard just to stop one or two editors, as it prevents more productive edits from taking place. I suggest giving a partial block (For only the t life page) to those that have caused the most chaos in the edit war, instead of protecting it and not allowing anyone to edit.

The word 'caused' is problematic. If you start looking for causes, you'll likely find more of them than you expected. Even just looking at edit history https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... on=history

The whole idea is bad. It does not resolve the disagreement on the content (i.e. which wording to prefer in OCA:tlife when discussing differences between rule definitions/rulestrings).

Wiki articles are primarily for newcomers and outside readers. Many readers are not familiar with all the local jargon. You won't go very far by writing for yourself and talking to yourself.

[Haycat2009]

Protecting the T life page is a little overboard just to stop one or two editors, as it prevents more productive edits from taking place. I suggest giving a partial block (For only the t life page) to those that have caused the most chaos in the edit war, instead of protecting it and not allowing anyone to edit.

The word 'caused' is problematic. If you start looking for causes, you'll likely find more of them than you expected. Even just looking at edit history https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... on=history

The whole idea is bad. It does not resolve the disagreement on the content (i.e. which wording to prefer in OCA:tlife when discussing differences between rule definitions/rulestrings).

Wiki articles are primarily for newcomers and outside readers. Many readers are not familiar with all the local jargon. You won't go very far by writing for yourself and talking to yourself.

While this is true, the main reason is the condition vs transition thing. Either they give the problem makers a partial block, or we ignore this. I am surprised that this has not spread to other pages, though.

[confocaloid]

While this is true, the main reason is the condition vs transition thing

The whole idea is bad. It does not resolve the disagreement on the content (i.e. which wording to prefer in OCA:tlife when discussing differences between rule definitions/rulestrings).

[dvgrn]

The protection of a page where edit wars are happening is pretty much always going to be a temporary measure, just to send a clear signal that a moderator is getting involved and the unnecessary and undesirable edit war is definitely going to stop, right then.

Naturally, one side or the other of the debate will generally think that the Wrong Version of the page has gotten protected -- but that's completely beside the point. If a page gets protected, that means that avoiding the edit war has become far more important than getting the disputed page exactly correct at exactly that moment. Protection of the page makes it impossible to continue the edit war and clearly communicates to everyone involved that a different stage of the LW:DR dispute resolution process has been reached.

I've gone ahead and un-protected the OCA:tlife page now, since it seems that a second moderator has now been consulted and has posted two responses. The LW:DR escalation seems to have happened a little ahead of the one-week timeframe described in the rules, but close enough -- we're just getting started trying out this newly written procedure.

Still wearing my moderator hat, I will now say that it still looks to me like a consensus has been reached on this issue. That will be true until and unless members of the community who have not yet participated in the discussion decide to speak up to add new information -- or unless any of the current participants speak up to say they've changed their minds, of course.

There's currently no evidence of current community support for retaining confocaloid's change of 'transition' to 'condition' in those four places. That edit can be safely rolled back for now, and it should not be re-done unless some significant new information comes in from new participants in the discussion.

At this point I'm thinking everybody should understand how to avoid future edit warring on the OCA:tlife page. Let's see how well that works out in practice!

EDIT: I had thought that the "wearing my moderator hat" phrase above would make this sufficiently clear, but apparently it wasn't clear to everyone: that paragraph and the following one were an official executive decision on the transition vs. condition edit war issue, made by me as a moderator, following the new LW:DR dispute resolution rules. If an executive decision needs to be appealed, that should be done by following those same rules.

I hope that executive decisions like this will be needed only very rarely. But to avoid any confusion in the future, I'll be sure to label any executive decisions really clearly, with a heading like the following:

Executive decision by dvgrn per LW:DR

[confocaloid]

There's currently no evidence of current community support for retaining confocaloid's change of 'transition' to 'condition' in those four places.

"There's currently no evidence of current community support" for rolling back my edits, either.
There are instead:

* strong objections from yourself, expressing preference to 'transition' in that article.

* replies from hotdogPi and galoomba, stating that the word 'transition' is commonly used (which are not a valid objection, because 'condition' is also commonly used as evidenced by the many quotes I posted).
viewtopic.php?p=172028#p172028
viewtopic.php?p=171670#p171670

* viewtopic.php?p=171889#p171889 reply by snowman, stating "it's best to just leave occurrences of either alone as was written by the author"
This can only apply to writings that have a single author. Wiki articles do not have a single author and are aimed towards a different audience.

* viewtopic.php?p=172090#p172090 reply by azulavoir, stating "As someone who was quoted as using the term "condition", I actually prefer transition in most contexts. Especially in the context "x transitions from Life" - where transition carries the very nice dual meaning of a cell changing state and the rule being altered."
Again, this discusses contexts on the forum, without acknowledging that the issue is about what wording to use on the wiki.

* unexplained revert by Haycat2009 in the beginning of the edit war.

Can you please directly acknowledge that your opinion is not the community opinion? Ignoring the edit war between you and me in OCA:tlife, and looking only at replies from other people, there are no strong objections to retaining my edits from people other than you.

[dvgrn]

Can you please directly acknowledge that your opinion is not the community opinion? Ignoring the edit war between you and me in OCA:tlife, and looking only at replies from other people, there are no strong objections to retaining my edits from people other than you.

I directly acknowledge that my opinion is not the community opinion.

Your special-case pleadings and exceptions and caveats and invalidations of other people's stated opinions, however, don't make any sense to me -- they just don't carry any weight. These people clearly seem to be telling you that don't want you to make that particular change to the OCA:tlife article. If they really did want you to make that change, then how would their actions (reverting your edit, responding to you, etc.) make any kind of sense at all?

Of course, I could have gotten the wrong impression about this. If so, there's been plenty of time for them to speak up and correct me. And it's still not too late. This is not an urgent issue -- we can always fix it later, if new information shows up. Please stop making such a fuss in the meantime.

Looking at this whole discussion again, I still think that I asked the question that I wanted to hear an answer to, in my very first forum post on this issue:

I'd like to hear what other people think about this. Should we leave the four uses of "transition" in the OCA:Tlife article the way they currently are, or would it be better to change them to "condition"?

Notice that you, confocaloid, were not being asked this question and you can't possibly answer this question.

Now, check the number and length of posts that you contributed immediately after that.

I tried to re-state my question to other people, several times, so that other people might possibly have a chance of seeing it -- in between your various highly repetitive declarative statements, and my various attempts to ask you questions in response. But it got pretty hopeless after a while.

In future debates of this type, please reduce the volume of your contributions by about a factor of ten, and I'll be careful to do the same. I absolutely agree that that will give other people a lot more space to make their own opinions heard, just as you say.

-- Speaking of asking questions, I just responded to one of your requests at the top of this post. It's your turn. This is a direct request from a moderator for an answer to an important question:

I asked you a direct and relevant question in my last post above, which you haven't answered:

I don't think it's any kind of a problem that you didn't understand that rule on November 21 and 22 -- no blame needs to be assigned. I would like to make sure that you know to follow that rule in the future, though -- can you please say something to confirm that?

Please respond to that question. There's really no use trying to discuss 'transition' vs. 'condition' until you're following LifeWiki rules a lot better than you have been recently.

[confocaloid]

Of course, I could have gotten the wrong impression about this. If so, there's been plenty of time for them to speak up and correct me.

It would be much easier for people to understand the issue and reply, if you did not fill the thread with your long posts.

Looking at this whole discussion again, I still think that I asked the question that I wanted to hear an answer to, in my very first forum post on this issue:

I tried to re-state my question to other people, several times,

That thread is a dedicated thread for the issue.
In your first post in that thread, you already asked your question that you wanted to hear an answer to.
There was no need to repeat it again and again. There was no need for your longposts either. People who are interested and read the thread, will most likely quickly reach your first post in that thread.

-- Speaking of asking questions, I just responded to one of your requests at the top of this post. It's your turn. This is a direct request from a moderator for an answer to an important question:

I asked you a direct and relevant question in my last post above, which you haven't answered:

I don't think it's any kind of a problem that you didn't understand that rule on November 21 and 22 -- no blame needs to be assigned. I would like to make sure that you know to follow that rule in the future, though -- can you please say something to confirm that?

Please respond to that question. There's really no use trying to discuss 'transition' vs. 'condition' until you're following LifeWiki rules a lot better than you have been recently.

I think there are much more important community rules (not necessarily written anywhere) that are broken in these disputes between you and me.

[dvgrn]

In your first post in that thread, you already asked your question that you wanted to hear an answer to.
There was no need to repeat it again and again. There was no need for your longposts either. People who are interested and read the thread, will most likely quickly reach your first post in that thread.
...
I think there are much more important community rules (not necessarily written anywhere) that are broken in these disputes between you and me.

I've reviewed your feedback. Not surprisingly, I'm going to continue to use my own judgment in these cases. It is not my job as a moderator, LifeWiki editor, or forum participant to defer to your opinions, no matter how often or how rudely you state them. I already agree with the great majority of your opinions about things, and new information and good arguments can sometimes convince me to change my opinion to match yours -- but sometimes our opinions will inevitably differ.

If you're interested in codifying these unspecified other community rules that you mention, that are unrelated to but much more important than the new LW:DR dispute resolution rules, please feel free to start a new thread about them.

Now, as the moderator who is collaborating with Nathaniel to get the new LW:DR rules set up, I have a couple of short questions for you:

Do you understand the LW:DR rules now?

(Your post yesterday seemed to imply that some of the key details weren't clear to you yet.)

When disputes arise in the future, do you intend to carefully follow those rules?

(Very few people are really worried about either assigning blame or avoiding blame for past actions based on past misunderstandings, related to this storm-in-a-teacup transition-vs.-condition issue.

What's important is reducing the amount of silly unpleasantness in future disputes.

The conwaylife.com admin/moderator team currently believes that, when future issues arise, it will really help a lot if people make a good-faith effort to try out the new LW:DR escalation procedure.)

[confocaloid]

The same rules should apply to you.

The self-reporting idea in the first post is inherently destructive to the community. People don't report themselves. Demanding that they do amounts to serious psychological abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

[hotdogPi]

Think of the button as saying "alert a moderator" instead of "report".

[dvgrn]

Transitions are events that can happen, when certain conditions are met.
An example of a transition would be "an alive cell survives".
An example of a condition would be that an alive cell survives when it has 2 alive neighbours.

Question #1: @confocaloid, given our recent discussions, might it not be a good idea to let someone else besides you or me answer C28's "what is the difference between 'transition' and 'condition' " question? C28 wasn't asking what you thought the best term would be to use on the LifeWiki. The question was about the difference "when talking about CA rules".

In your answer to that basic question, you seem to be speaking with some authority, as an expert on the subject -- and yet you didn't mention the meaning of 'transition' that is most commonly used by far when talking about CA rules, both on the forums and the LifeWiki.

When the word 'transition' appears in either the forums or the LifeWiki, it will usually have the meaning that you're trying to reserve for "condition". Will it not be confusing to newbies reading your answer, if that awkward detail isn't mentioned prominently somewhere?

There are various things we could do about this problem, at this point. For example, I'll be happy to remove the answer that I added after yours, if you agree to modify the linked definitions post as I suggest below.

Question #2: @confocaloid, given that the OCA:tlife article now links to the top of your "Rule definition terminology" thread as an authority for which wording to use on LifeWiki, would you consider editing that post to mention that 'transition' is currently in common use on the LifeWiki and on the forums to mean the same thing as the definition you give there for 'condition'?

I originally wrote the following as an addendum to the Basic Questions post, but moved it over here in an attempt to keep things shorter. This thread seems like a better place to hash all of this out than the Basic Questions thread, so if any long posts show up over there I'll probably move them over here.

Full disclosure
I recently made an executive decision as a moderator to retain uses of the word 'transition' on the LifeWiki, with the meaning that that first post currently seems to be reserving for the term 'condition' -- based on various feedback from the community lower down in that linked thread.

For an example of those LifeWiki uses, the first paragraph of the OCA:tlife article points to the Hensel notation article. That article has one use of the term 'condition', and seventeen uses of the word 'transition' to mean more or less the same thing.

I haven't gone back yet and tried to trace the etymology properly. For isotropic rules, the 102 transitions/conditions are also quite often referred to as "isotropic bits" -- each bit can be either on or off, and so 102 bits uniquely specifies an isotropic rule. Now I'm wondering if the term 'transition' might have gotten its start with the idea of each isotropic bit counting as its own mini 'transition rule' -- with all those individual pieces of a full rule string being combined to produce the full CA rule.

I'm not sure there's any evidence in the form of older uses of "transition rule" that got shortened to plain "transitions", though -- the use of 'transition' in the 'isotropic bit' sense is quite old and well-established by this time.

Long story short: @C28, I'd say that your question doesn't have a particularly simple answer -- except that 'transition' and 'condition' are currently very often used to mean the same thing.

[confocaloid]

I don't think there is any need to remove your post in basic questions. I already replied there. viewtopic.php?p=172234#p172234

... would you consider editing that post to mention that 'transition' is currently in common use on the LifeWiki and on the forums to mean the same thing as the definition you give there for 'condition'?

The first post in the thread "Rule definition terminology" already says that in informal discussions it is common to use 'transition' to mean 'condition'.

In jargon/in informal discussions, it is somewhat common to mix the two and write 'transition' instead of 'condition', but that is imprecise, and therefore should be avoided when explaining things to people that do not yet know them (e.g. on LifeWiki).

Full disclosure
I recently made an executive decision as a moderator to retain uses of the word 'transition' on the LifeWiki, with the meaning that that first post currently seems to be reserving for the term 'condition' -- based on various feedback from the community lower down in that linked thread.

You are an involved moderator who was a side in this dispute from the beginning. And you are essentially ignoring the arguments in the thread and quotes that I provided, including CA-related quotes from outside this website. Those quotes by themselves count as expressions of choice of multiple people, where those people used the word 'condition' because it was a natural choice in the context, leading to better clarity.

[dvgrn]

@confocaloid, could you please try quoting one of my questions, and then answering it? Then repeat the procedure with another one of my questions?

That is something that you haven't done yet, during any of our discussions that I can recall. I'm really hoping that it starts happening soon.

-- Okay, that's not entirely fair. You left off my "question 1" label, but did answer the first question.

EDIT Sorry, that was the "question 2" label. You did answer the second question. I was actually trying to suggest editing the definition of 'transition' itself, since I don't think that a mention lower down is sufficient -- but I wasn't clear on that in my question.

How about question #1?

[confocaloid]

I believe I already attempted to reply to your posts, to the best of my ability.
Also, multiple people don't use the quote feature on the forums much or at all, without adverse effects on the ability to communicate.

[dvgrn]

I believe I already attempted to reply to your posts, to the best of my ability.
Also, multiple people don't use the quote feature on the forums much or at all, without adverse effects on the ability to communicate.

There's a difference between replying to posts and answering questions.

In my capacity as moderator, I've been asking some really important direct questions -- and I haven't been getting very many direct answers. The answers to direct questions that can be answered with "yes" or "no" will very often contain a "yes" or a "no", for example. I haven't been seeing those kinds of direct answers. I'm really hoping for some direct answers.

Can you directly answer my question #1 above, please?

And can you then please directly answer the linked questions I mentioned above?

[confocaloid]

You are linking twice to the same post. I believe I already replied to you to the best of my ability.
Since both of us are involved parties in this dispute from the very beginning, I think it is up to other people to decide which of us failed to communicate their ideas, arguments, questions, responses to what extent.

[dvgrn]

You are linking twice to the same post. I believe I already replied to you to the best of my ability.

Yes, same post. Not a mistake. Really important questions.

Do you understand the LW:DR rules now?

When disputes arise in the future, do you intend to carefully follow those rules?

If I've missed your yes-or-no answers to those questions anywhere, I really do apologize. Would you mind giving me a link to where your "yes" or "no" answers are? Or just give me the "yes" or "no" again here, for those two questions?

[confocaloid]

Answering again.
You are here repeatedly trying to pretend that you can act as an uninvolved moderator. You cannot. You are directly involved in this dispute as a side, with strong preferences on the condition-vs.-transition issue, from the very beginning, from the very first your edit in OCA:tlife and the very first your posts on the issue.

Does this answer your questions?

[dvgrn]

Does this answer your questions?

No, it really doesn't.

There were two questions in my last post. Both of them allow the possibility of yes-or-no answers. I've asked for yes-or-no answers. You haven't given any yes-or-no answers. So your response doesn't answer those two questions in any way.

You are here repeatedly trying to pretend that you can act as an uninvolved moderator. You cannot. You are directly involved in this dispute as a side, with strong preferences on the condition-vs.-transition issue, from the very beginning, from the very first your edit in OCA:tlife and the very first your posts on the issue.

I'm sorry, confocaloid, but your impression of the way moderation works in this small community is completely inaccurate. There is pretty much never ever on the conwaylife.com forums going to exist such an improbable creature as an "uninvolved moderator" in the way that you're implicitly defining the term. I'll explain this further below. Given the nonexistence of the moderators that you want to have, we're going to have to just keep muddling along with the real human moderators that we actually do have.

By the time a moderator makes a decision on any particular issue, they will have looked at the arguments on both sides and will be more convinced by one side or the other. If the act of making a decision makes a moderator into some kind of corrupted partisan -- and if you then feel free to call them out as a corrupted partisan and claim that they're disqualified from moderation! -- then there's no possible way that a moderator could ever make and implement a decision that you don't agree with. Catch-22 -- you could always overrule them with this "corrupted partisan" claim.

That wouldn't work out well at all. Just think of the likelihood of mis-use of a mechanism like that by trolls -- or, heh, study current American politics for a while.

Luckily, moderation doesn't work that way. Moderators are trusted to do their best to make decisions that reflect the community's preferences on a given issue. What they personally believe about that issue isn't terribly relevant. Notice that they will quite likely happen to agree with the preferences of the majority of community, just by simple statistical likelihood!

If a moderator makes a clearly unpopular decision that is in line with their own preferences but not the community's, then there's an escalation path laid out in LW:DR for fixing that kind of thing. Nothing like that has happened here, as far as I can tell -- and you've gotten an opinion from an independent second moderator that says the same thing.

Please read the boldface sentence in Sokwe's response, and think very carefully before posting any further accusations of moderator malfeasance. Sokwe does not use boldface lightly. That's an important sentence. In the future, if you see unbearable injustice, please use the LW:DR escalation path to resolve it.

The admin/moderator team needs to have a reasonable expectation of being able to make occasional executive decisions without being attacked. If you can't stop yourself from attacking moderators, you're not doing a good job of respecting this community and its rules.

[calcyman]

Firstly, since the one thing that seems to have unanimous support here (from both dvgrn and confocaloid) is having more opinions about the 'condition vs transition' issue, I'll try to explain my understanding of the difference between these two terms. (Maybe this should be cross-posted to the 'rule terminology thread' -- feel free to do so if this helps.)

As I see it, a rule is a set of transitions, each of the form "condition ==> action". So, in CGoL, "a cell is born if it is currently dead and has three live neighbours" is a transition, and "being currently dead and having three live neighbours" is the condition for that transition to occur. That's consistent with how 'condition' is used in linguistics and in propositional logic.

A rulestring such as B3/S23 is highly compressed: it encodes the rule (set of transitions) by specifying the conditions for birth and the conditions for survival, with the implicit understanding that the stagnation and death conditions are the complements of these. Because rule strings are compressed instead of being written out more explicitly (like how Golly rule table files are written), the distinction between transitions and conditions is somewhat blurred. For example, someone could read B3/S23 as:

(currently dead and 3 live neighbours) ==> birth
(currently alive and has 2 or 3 live neighbours) ==> survival

in which case the 3 and 23 are being read as conditions. But that's not the only way to understand a rulestring; it can also be read as a set of transitions, i.e. {B3, S2, S3}, where for brevity we omit the duplicate S and write it as B3/S23. This is somewhat natural because Hensel notation works in a similar way: if we have the transitions B4k and B4q, or equivalently the birth conditions 4k and 4q, we abbreviate the combination of them to 4kq.

So when referring to parts of a rulestring, it's correct to use either 'condition' or 'transition'; it's only when we're writing out a full rule table that the distinction becomes clear (that the transition is the whole row of the rule table, whereas the condition doesn't include the next state).

Just because you decided to use this particular article as an opportunity to harass me, does not mean my edits are not improvements.

This isn't harassment: it's a technical argument about terminology, and one that (like most arguments) is best left being dispassionate and impersonal. Please refrain from accusing other forum members of harassment unless they are actually harassing you (which would involve, for example, repeated unwanted direct messages, etc, rather than just countering your forum posts and wiki edits); making false personal accusations such as this is defamatory and also in breach of the forum rules.

I can also say for certain that Dave doesn't have any sort of personal vendetta against you; he's mentioned (to me, at least) that most of your contributions to the LifeWiki are helpful improvements, and that it's a shame that you're getting caught up in edit wars because your other contributions are highly valued.

[confocaloid]

As I see it, a rule is a set of transitions, each of the form "condition ==> action". So, in CGoL, "a cell is born if it is currently dead and has three live neighbours" is a transition, and "being currently dead and having three live neighbours" is the condition for that transition to occur. That's consistent with how 'condition' is used in linguistics and in propositional logic.

[...]

So when referring to parts of a rulestring, it's correct to use either 'condition' or 'transition'; it's only when we're writing out a full rule table that the distinction becomes clear (that the transition is the whole row of the rule table, whereas the condition doesn't include the next state).

Thanks for the response.
If the word 'condition' will be reserved on LifeWiki for the environment of a cell (possibly including the state of the cell itself, but not including the next state), then I believe it would be better to write 'transition rule' instead of just 'transition', whenever the meaning is the whole row of the ruletable.
For me, 'transition' reads as a synonym of 'action' or 'event'. I think writing 'transition rule' would clarify that it is not itself an action or event, but instead prescribes some action or event in some situation. I think this choice is also supported by existing usage. example 1 example 2

You are here repeatedly trying to pretend that you can act as an uninvolved moderator. You cannot. You are directly involved in this dispute as a side, with strong preferences on the condition-vs.-transition issue, from the very beginning, from the very first your edit in OCA:tlife and the very first your posts on the issue.

I'm sorry, confocaloid, but your impression of the way moderation works in this small community is completely inaccurate. There is pretty much never ever on the conwaylife.com forums going to exist such an improbable creature as an "uninvolved moderator" in the way that you're implicitly defining the term. I'll explain this further below. Given the nonexistence of the moderators that you want to have, we're going to have to just keep muddling along with the real human moderators that we actually do have.

By the time a moderator makes a decision on any particular issue, they will have looked at the arguments on both sides and will be more convinced by one side or the other. [...]

You did not correctly restate my objection. You are ascribing to me something I did not intend.

If an otherwise previously uninvolved moderator (or several previously otherwise uninvolved moderators) review discussion / arguments, and if they post their opinion / decision, that does not make them otherwise involved or biased.

What I say is that you (dvgrn) were involved in the dispute on the content of OCA:tlife from the very beginning. You were objecting to my rewording and participating in an edit war with me as a side. You are involved and biased in this disagreement.

[dvgrn]

What I say is that you (dvgrn) were involved in the dispute on the content of OCA:tlife from the very beginning. You were objecting to my rewording and participating in an edit war with me as a side. You are involved and biased in this disagreement.

I'll try a brief response here, but honestly I've already said pretty much everything I'm going to say on this issue. Being "involved" doesn't necessarily make me "biased". Please read Sokwe's boldface sentence again, and the part about how available perfectly independent moderators (by your standards) may simply not exist -- no matter how much you might wish that you could keep shopping your issue to one moderator after another until you find one who agrees with you.

Stop making these kinds of accusations. They're against the forum rules, they're unpleasant and unwarranted, and they don't make anybody in the community more sympathetic to your case -- at least, not anybody that I've heard from so far, despite my various appeals for that kind of feedback.

[confocaloid]

For the record, I did actually read and re-read all those replies by people other than you, including replies by other moderators. I do appreciate those replies by people other than you.

I do say that you are intimidating me in various ways. Most likely this is because of our disagreements on several terminology questions and LifeWiki/Life Lexicon differences, where you have strong opinions and you do not want to allow changes that somehow conflict with your viewpoint on the issues.

Being "involved" doesn't necessarily make me "biased".

You are strongly biased against me in these terminology debates. This is about you vs. me specifically.
I did read and re-read posts by others and I will reread them again later.

[dvgrn]

I do say that you are intimidating me in various ways.

Well, here's the thing. I've got no interest in making you uncomfortable unnecessarily. These discussions are very time-consuming and no fun at all for me either.

However, when someone breaks forum rules as often as you've been doing recently, and shows no sign of stopping or even of understanding that they're breaking the rules... then moderators are going to have to get the rule-breaker's attention somehow.

So far it has been really difficult to get you to acknowledge how big a problem your recent rule-breaking has been.

Most likely this is because of our disagreements on several terminology questions and LifeWiki/Life Lexicon differences, where you have strong opinions and you do not want to allow changes that somehow conflict with your viewpoint on the issues.

A lot of what you've been saying along these lines is actually perfectly true. A lot of what you're saying is even, presumably, perfectly obvious to almost everyone. Maybe it will help if I explicitly acknowledge that here. (?)

I do, in fact, "not want to allow changes that somehow conflict with my viewpoint on the issues". This is because, in each of these cases, I've done my homework. I've reached out to others in the community -- anyone who is willing to express an opinion -- and gotten contemporaneous feedback. I've gathered evidence that is compelling to me, that my viewpoint is in line with the community's viewpoint on the issues.

Of course the "community's viewpoint" is not always unanimous... but in each case that we're talking about, there has been a clearly expressed and long-lasting supermajority opinion that can reasonably be called a consensus.

That being the case, why in Conway's name would I want to allow changes that conflict with community consensus? The fact that I agree with the community consensus myself ... can't possibly come as a surprise to anyone.

You keep bringing up the fact that I've been "involved from the beginning and have a strong opinion". You say this as if it's damning evidence of moderator malfeasance. It seems like your implication is that I'm logically obligated to stop opposing you and creep back into my Evil Dvgrn Lair in shame and embarrassment and lick my wounds in defeat... But really that fact is just a completely harmless fact. It doesn't mean that I'm misbehaving at all. I agree with that fact. I acknowledge it. I just don't think it's interesting or surprising.

I'm doing something that moderators have to do sometimes -- make executive decisions -- and thus far, absolutely nobody except for you has expressed any objections. As you re-consider all of this, please keep firmly in mind the complete absence of any complaints from others about my actions as a moderator. Nobody's telling you that you have to agree with every decision that a moderator makes ... but we are telling you that you have to respect the community by following the escalation rules and not making a lot of extraneous noisy rule-1a-breaking posts.

Expectations about Moderators: Redux
There aren't any forum rules -- express or implied -- that say that moderators aren't allowed to have their own opinions. What community standards do say is that moderators shouldn't abuse their powers to take actions that are in line with their own personal opinions and against the wishes of the community. When someone does attempt to do something that's against the wishes of the community, moderators may have to intervene.

... Very reluctantly, I might add! We're all just volunteers, mostly very busy with other things most of the time, and we'd all much rather not have to do this kind of thing at all. We think that the LW:DR rules will help make it clear to everyone what is expected from them, so that hopefully we won't have to intervene too often in the future.

You are strongly biased against me in these terminology debates. This is about you vs. me specifically.

This part is completely not true, as calcyman and others have attested.

I strongly support all of your good ideas that the rest of the conwaylife.com community agrees with.

I strongly do not support any of your not-good ideas that the rest of the conwaylife.com community does not agree with -- even (or especially) in cases where you keep trying to implement those ideas anyway.

As best as I can manage it, I'm working with you in the same way as I work with anybody else in the community who has a lot of good ideas and an occasional not-good idea. I can definitely see why you might feel singled out, but honestly the uniquely large amount of attention on you is entirely because you have a lot more ideas -- all sorts of ideas -- than the average contributor to the forums and LifeWiki ... and you don't seem to have much practice at noticing and accepting feedback, when people try to tell you that an idea that you're enthusiastic about just plain isn't going to work out in practice.

Given that we're both human, not all of your ideas are going to be good ones, just like some of my ideas are bound to be terrible. The current admin/mod team has some suggestions in LW:DR about how best to get help from the community in reviewing your ideas before you start implementing them, and weeding out the occasional not-good ones before they start causing the kind of trouble that we've seen in this most recent case.