LifeWiki and INT-WIKI -- OCA notability policy, etc.

[dvgrn]

This is a new discussion thread created via Moderator Shenanigans, on a topic that started with this "Should there be an OCA notability policy?" question:

Relatedly, there doesn't appear to be a notability policy on rules/OCA other than the GNG. Should there be? There are plenty of rules with no article that have (subjectively) interesting properties (e.g. ShipWorld) but I'm not sure what the requirements are for a standalone OCA-space article.

The date on this post has no significance -- it's just a date that is safely before the discussion started, so that this thread can start with a link to that post in its original location (without moving that post, since part of it belonged where it was posted).

[confocaloid]

There are plenty of rules with no article that have (subjectively) interesting properties (e.g. ShipWorld) but I'm not sure what the requirements are for a standalone OCA-space article

If a CA rule was explored and discussed (so that is possible to start an article about it, containing enough initial content to show that the rule was explored and discussed), then anyone who feels like they know enough about the rule to start an article can just go ahead and start an article (as long as that does not mean documenting your own discoveries).

I think this is a common-sense rule of thumb for any other topic as well.

[hotdogPi]

I don't want a whole bunch of OCA pages; in fact, I would prefer deleting some of the ones that currently exist (mainly the explosive ones that share absolutely no similarities with Life). This is the LifeWiki, not the INT-Wiki.

[confocaloid]

I don't want a whole bunch of OCA pages; in fact, I would prefer deleting some of the ones that currently exist (mainly the explosive ones that share absolutely no similarities with Life). This is the LifeWiki, not the INT-Wiki.

I think most rules either were not explored deeply, or were not discussed actively, or both. And there is already a separate namespace for other rules.

[Haycat2009]

Nobody cares if the rule is very different from life, if it has interesting dynamics or technology, it is ok.

[confocaloid]

Nobody cares if the rule is very different from life, if it has interesting dynamics/technology, it is ok.

FWIW not everyone cares if the rule has any technology. Interesting dynamics (or anything else sufficiently interesting/unique) would suffice.
In my view, the fun thing about this is that articles are supposed to be written from already existing discussions / webpages / other preexisting sources. If people already found/built and discussed some interesting stuff in a rule, that discussion can become a source for some part of an article. When it is possible to collect already existing information about a rule and transform it into an encyclopedic-style wiki article, (without breaking style guidelines and other basic expectations), issues like the way of structuring of the article or presence of some specific sections become relatively unimportant.

This is definitely offtopic in this thread, but I don't really know where this should be moved.

[dvgrn]

I don't want a whole bunch of OCA pages; in fact, I would prefer deleting some of the ones that currently exist (mainly the explosive ones that share absolutely no similarities with Life). This is the LifeWiki, not the INT-Wiki.

This statement does seem to have started an interesting discussion. I'm not sure how much farther the discussion will go, but I think it's an important enough issue to deserve its own LifeWiki discussion thread. I'll go ahead and move the relevant posts.

Re: hotdogPi's idea that "This is the LifeWiki, not the INT-Wiki" --

This was definitely exactly my attitude until shortly before the OCA namespace was created. It didn't seem appropriate to add much non-Life-related content to the main namespace -- too much potential for clutter and confusion. So for a while in the mid-2010s, when ... um ... OCA items of unclear notability occasionally started getting added to the LifeWiki, I would sometimes push back on those additions.

But I really wasn't ever very happy doing that. It seemed like a lot of those additions really were interesting -- maybe not to me so much, but to a good subset of the community. It made sense that they should be collected somewhere -- not in the LifeWiki's main namespace, but maybe somewhere not too far away.

The idea of creating the OCA namespace in 2019, was that "the LifeWiki" has now gotten a little bit more complicated. There's "the main namespace of the LifeWiki", which is still supposed to be mostly reserved for Conway's Life topics (with just maybe a few mentions of other "nearby" rules when that's appropriate).

But now there's also "the OCA namespace of the LifeWiki", which is a separate entity -- and I'd say that it really is specifically intended to be the "INT-Wiki" (even though for convenience's sake it's still accessed through conwaylife.com.)

[ilo Lisipo]

This is a new discussion thread created via Moderator Shenanigans, on a topic that started with this "Should there be an OCA notability policy?" question:

(snip)

Woah! Time traveling moderator shenanigans...

As for the actual question, I have very little horse in this race so-to-speak. It seems obvious to me that we can't allow an unrestricted flow of OCA pages, but I think the correct line to draw is somewhere, I'm just not sure where - I think "as long as you're not documenting your own discoveries, it's probably fine" is too low a bar, but I'm not sure how to make the bar higher without introducing silly loopholes and inconsistencies. Maybe this is just the sort of thing that should be on a case-by-case-basis?'

Ideologically I find myself agreeing with the idea that the existence of the OCA namespace qualifies LifeWiki as an OCA wiki (and since the other in OCA refers to "not Life", therefore it qualifies LifeWiki as an "all cellular automata" wiki to some reasonable extent).

[confocaloid]

Maybe this is just the sort of thing that should be on a case-by-case-basis?

There is already for example LifeWiki:Style guide. If one is serious about those guidelines, and if the common-sense things are done (e.g. avoiding ridiculously short stubs), I think that would suffice, simply because it takes some efforts to write a reasonably good article.

[dvgrn]

Maybe this is just the sort of thing that should be on a case-by-case-basis?

There is already for example LifeWiki:Style guide. If one is serious about those guidelines, and if the common-sense things are done (e.g. avoiding ridiculously short stubs), I think that would suffice, simply because it takes some efforts to write a reasonably good article.

Makes sense to me!

There usually seems to be a point where the more we try to make a set of notability rules perfectly clear, covering all of the possible bases, the more silly loopholes and inconsistencies get created.

The usual mechanism (in the OCA namespace as well as in the main namespace) is that when a new article seems to be too far over the mysterious "notability" line, someone will put a notability tag on the article, so that the issue can (hopefully) get discussed.

With any luck, most of these notability issues can get sorted out without moderator intervention. Occasionally it might be good to have a moderator help settle an issue eventually with a best guess at a notable/not notable decision.

I don't think we currently have any moderators that spend a lot of time thinking about notability in the OCA namespace, though! Maybe it's time to add a few people to the moderator team, who are mostly or entirely focused on OCA. (?)

[confocaloid]

By the way, recent edits in OCA:HighFlock look like someone documenting their own discoveries, which goes against LifeWiki:Notability#General_notability_guideline.

(as long as that does not mean documenting your own discoveries)

I think "as long as you're not documenting your own discoveries, it's probably fine" is too low a bar,

[Haycat2009]

By the way, recent edits in OCA:HighFlock look like someone documenting their own discoveries, which goes against LifeWiki:Notability#General_notability_guideline.

(as long as that does not mean documenting your own discoveries)

I think "as long as you're not documenting your own discoveries, it's probably fine" is too low a bar,

It is ok as long as it is not in a new page.

[Haycat2009]

There are plenty of rules with no article that have (subjectively) interesting properties (e.g. ShipWorld) but I'm not sure what the requirements are for a standalone OCA-space article

If a CA rule was explored and discussed (so that is possible to start an article about it, containing enough initial content to show that the rule was explored and discussed), then anyone who feels like they know enough about the rule to start an article can just go ahead and start an article (as long as that does not mean documenting your own discoveries).

I think this is a common-sense rule of thumb for any other topic as well.

Agreed. All interesting rules deserve some information, and where to put it but the Ca wiki?

[DroneBetter]

By the way, recent edits in OCA:HighFlock look like someone documenting their own discoveries, which goes against LifeWiki:Notability#General_notability_guideline.

Here, Confocal is talking about me, I'm afraid.

I always assumed that it was okay when they were new speeds of spaceships/first spaceships of minimal period for known speed/new spaceships of minimal minpop (since all of these are notable), since doing any of these is computationally hard enough to be interesting, and (since it becomes moreso with each period exhausted) the number of such discoveries that can be made is effectively finitely bounded. I will desist if anyone says these are not notable. (OCA:EightFlock, which I intend to get to after finishing some searches in OCA:HighFlock and OCA: Pedestrian Flock, has a discussion describing it as insufficiently notable to warrant separation from Flock, I wanted to make each of them notable enough for their separate articles to be worth having.)

[dvgrn]

I always assumed that it was okay when they were new speeds of spaceships/first spaceships of minimal period for known speed/new spaceships of minimal minpop (since all of these are notable)...

Yeah, I seem to remember this kind of nuance coming up before -- don't remember where exactly. My take on the exceptions to the "people shouldn't document their own discoveries" rule is:

• If a new discovery makes something already written in a LifeWiki article incorrect, incomplete or misleading, then it doesn't matter who corrects it;
• If a new discovery is clearly notable (like it gets a lot of attention, or multiple votes in a POTY competition, or something like that) then it doesn't matter who adds an article. This problem has come up occasionally, where nobody except the creator of some complicated thing feels competent to write an article about it.

The notability threshold for OCA topics isn't zero, but I think it's quite a bit lower than for B3/S23 topics. When an article about an OCA rule is being filled out with "all the relevant stuff", generally it doesn't seem like much attention gets paid to which person adds which pieces of information. The number of experts available for any given OCA rule is often going to be pretty small, such that it doesn't always work well for someone other than the discoverer to document a discovery.

Long story short, I guess, the "notability" rule seems much more useful and relevant to me when it is preventing enthusiastic newcomers from creating whole new articles, as opposed to when it is making experts worry about whether they're allowed to make changes to articles that would be uncontroversial improvements if anyone else was making them.

[confocaloid]

Here, Confocal is talking about me, I'm afraid.

I always assumed that it was okay when they were new speeds of spaceships/first spaceships of minimal period for known speed/new spaceships of minimal minpop (since all of these are notable), since doing any of these is computationally hard enough to be interesting, and (since it becomes moreso with each period exhausted) the number of such discoveries that can be made is effectively finitely bounded. [...]

The main complaint from me is that, even when the added information is notable, I believe it is better to post it first in a forum thread.
A forum post can contain more details and related information, and provide discovery information.
After that, the wiki article can be expanded to give a brief summary (with or without patterns shown in the article, depending on what's the discovery / whether or not it makes sense to show the pattern directly on the wiki), and link to the forum post via footnote in the usual way. (And in most cases it is better if it is someone else expanding the wiki article, rather than the discoverer.)

On the other hand, if you are adding the information directly to the wiki, then there is no source for the additions that could be linked. So readers will not know where this stuff comes from (who discovered it? when it was found? how it was found? etc. etc.) This is a problem.

[...] In my view, the fun thing about this is that articles are supposed to be written from already existing discussions / webpages / other preexisting sources. If people already found/built and discussed some interesting stuff in a rule, that discussion can become a source for some part of an article. [...]