confocaloid wrote: April 4th, 2025, 4:01 am
I disagree. That edit summary isn't really accurate.
First, there is currently no "standard" on this
that would be specific to LifeWiki.
I have now taken the time to click through and look at all eighty-some guns in the LifeWiki “Guns” category, one at a time.
As you say, there definitely is no
consistently applied standard that is maintained across all of the gun pages at the moment. The form of each gun is an individual choice made by each article’s author — and those choices are all over the map. There are guns with gliders well outside the bounding box, slightly outside the bounding box, well inside the bounding box, and just after the glider first appears. Occasionally an RLE got copied from the gun collection so it’s in canonical form — especially for guns in the mid-double digits, for some reason.
But more often, no output is shown at all. So that edit summary still seems accurate to me. There is a LifeWiki standard that I think is implied by the no-output patterns.
A sometimes-followed LifeWiki standard
When the LifeWiki displays and describes a pattern, it’s trying to be accurate and not confusing. Gun patterns without outputs are the miminal form that can accurately be labeled a “gun”. Output gliders are certainly handy for some purposes, but they’re not part of the gun, and they’re easy to obtain by running the pattern.
I haven’t surveyed all the no-output guns to this level of detail, but it looks like they’re very often in a low-population phase.
Check the
period-690 glider gun article, for example. I find the chosen phase to be pretty irritating, really, because it takes so long for the glider to escape that I think I must have missed it! However, the infobox lists a population of 62 — and the T=0 form shown has a population of 62.
That was a deliberate choice, made to align with a LifeWiki-specific standard. It shows the form that we need to know about to correctly fill in the infobox population parameter.
Gun-collection canonical form, by contrast, has some number of extra gliders included, bulking up the population. Those patterns usually aren’t the minimal form of the gun at all— there’s a widely varying number of extra gliders, plus an arbitrary-looking non-minpop phase of the gun that happens to align a glider with the gun’s all-phases bounding box — which may not match the current phase’s bounding box. It’s a complicated standard. It might be better to stick with a simple minpop standard on the LifeWiki.
The minpop state of a gun often doesn’t give much hint about where the output will appear, but it often does a good job of showcasing the active objects that will interact to create the output.
Long story short
There are advantages to both of these competing standards. If we want to go around standardizing gun articles, it’s not clear to me why a non-LifeWiki standard should necessarily be chosen over an existing LifeWiki-specific standard— given that neither standard has been followed particularly well to date!
Next steps
If someone wants to take on this gun standardization problem as an editing project, I’d suggest starting a discussion thread first to see if there’s a consensus about which standard we should consistently use. Otherwise this is in the category where it’s easy to get into accidental edit wars, because there are perfectly decent reasons to make changes to individual articles in either direction.
Unless we’re going to decide to pick one standard and stick with it, there’s no strong reason either to make changes (in either direction) to any one individual gun page, or to undo such a change once it is made.