Glider synthesis on LifeWiki

[muzik]

When earlier I edited a number of wiki pages about small still lives, I attempted to make the presentation more consistent, in particular by ensuring that the orientation of every still life shown in the infobox exactly matches the orientation of that still life in Mark Niemiec's synthesis database.

Was a consensus reached before a change this major was made?
[...]

Unlike your recent editing campaign, those changes were not major, and affected only several pages.

As far as I remember, before that, the majority of pages did already use orientation that matched Niemiec's database.

As far as I know, nobody objected to those changes at the time.

This change would indeed be widespread but I don't exactly see how it qualifies as major.

[...]

One of several recent undiscussed editing campaigns reverted several of those earlier changes, without explaining why.

The reasoning here should be obvious: the orientations in RLEs were inconsistent with the orientations used in images, and this was an attempt to remedy said issue.
[...]

When the orientation of an object in an RLE does not match the orientation of the object in the corresponding image file, one simply has to check which orientation is the preferred one, and change either the RLE, or the image, or both.

When the RLE already uses the same orientation as Niemiec's database, and the image file uses some other orientation, that means one needs to change the image.

Why, exactly, should Niemiec's orientations take priority over any other? Are the rules he used for how objects should be oriented detailed anywhere?

[...]

I can't help but notice that in this list, you've specifically picked all of the edits that happened to show "Manual revert", and not the roughly 100 others that didn't coincidentally end up undoing a prior change.

In other words, you undertook a large-scale editing campaign, apparently without bothering to check whether there is a consensus for editing those "roughly 100 others" pages in the specific way you decided to do.

Apparently you didn't bother to look to the edit history of those RLEs to see whether there were earlier changes in the other direction, either. Any such earlier changes in the opposite direction are an additional reason to avoid editing anything, and instead open a discussion regarding the issue. Which you didn't do.

Because for a consensus to have to be reached for a detail as minor as this seems excessive. As far as I could see at the time, nobody else had paid attention to the orientations of things since RLEs were first added for patterns in 2016, so anything not matching what the pictures were would simply be an easily-corrected holdover from those times.

While I now see that I was wrong in this assumption, I still don't get why this change to how things are oriented has elicited this level of controversy.

[confocaloid]

Why, exactly, should Niemiec's orientations take priority over any other? Are the rules he used for how objects should be oriented detailed anywhere?

Niemiec's pages and the glider synthesis database are an existing source on the topic, that provides useful noteworthy information, and can be referenced. To my knowledge, there are very few such sources.

Regarding preferred orientations of objects specifically, I think many of the initial early uploads of RLEs on the wiki already did use the orientation matching Niemiec's synthesis files. Also, I believe Niemiec's synthesis files are the best available source that in principle can be consistently followed.

There was a suggestion to use Catagolue instead, but that will cause obvious inconsistencies, as I noted before ( viewtopic.php?p=195147#p195147 ):

[...] These orientations look arbitrary from the viewpoint of a human reader.
Even if objects are visually similar / belong to the same family, their "apgcode orientations" can be different.

Look what happens with snakes, for example:

Code: Select all

x = 36, y = 8, rule = B3/S23
2o8b2o8b2o12b2o$o9bobo7bobo12bo$bo11bobo7bo10bo$2bo11b2o8bobo6bo$b2o
22b2o5bo$31bo$30bo$30b2o!

For these reasons, I believe Niemiec's orientations should take priority.

While I now see that I was wrong in this assumption, I still don't get why this change to how things are oriented has elicited this level of controversy.

I think that is primarily because your changes were a previously undiscussed wide set of changes across many pages done in a very short time.
There is no evidence of consensus, and there is evidence of someone quickly making many edits across the wiki. That is clearly problematic.

Further, that happened to overlap with several other (related or unrelated) similar attempted previously-undiscussed wide sets of changes across many pages done in a very short time (which are also problematic for the same reasons).