ConwayLife.com

Do not edit quoted text

H. H. P. M. P. Cole wrote: February 25th, 2024, 9:29 pm[...]
This rule is simultaneously very easy and very hard to search at the same time. On one hand, there are many high-period oscillators. On the other hand, there are tiny p2 and p3 'diacritics' that can attach onto the free ends of an oscillator, doubling or tripling the period while making it trivial.
[...]

Haycat2009 wrote: February 25th, 2024, 9:56 pm

H. H. P. M. P. Cole wrote: February 25th, 2024, 9:29 pm
This rule is simultaneously very easy and very hard to search at the same time. On one hand, there are many high-period oscillators. On the other hand, there are tiny p2 and p3 'diabetics' that can attach onto the free ends of an oscillator, doubling or tripling the period while making it trivial.

Just a question: Do you consider and add oscillators using diabetics to the list you made?

For clarification: I apologise for the mistake I made (and thanks for pointing it out)

This post has since been corrected.

Crossposting an earlier relevant issue from the "reviewing recent changes" thread:

confocaloid wrote: February 20th, 2024, 8:02 pm https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=145870
Repeated modification of a quote taken from https://web.archive.org/web/20000226192 ... anted.html Quotes should not be edited.
(previous modification of a quote on the same page: https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=145608 )
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confocaloid wrote: February 26th, 2024, 4:18 am Crossposting an earlier relevant issue from the "reviewing recent changes" thread:

confocaloid wrote: February 20th, 2024, 8:02 pm https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=145870
Repeated modification of a quote taken from https://web.archive.org/web/20000226192 ... anted.html Quotes should not be edited.
(previous modification of a quote on the same page: https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=145608 )
[...]

This is a really tricky case -- I can totally see how Haycat2009 made that mistake. The introductory paragraph at the top does say

"His quotes are preserved as-is."

... but then some of the text lower down consists of quotations from David Eppstein, and some of it is notes added later, with no good delineation between the two. The quotations were indented, but then the following annotations weren't, so it all ended up looking like one big paragraph of information.

I've just made an edit that hopefully patches up the issue raised by Haycat2009's good-faith edit in this case, and also makes the distinction between quotations and follow-up notes a bit more clear. This is a first attempt, so it's not at all unlikely that I've made mistakes myself somewhere in there -- anyone can please feel free to improve further.

https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=146166

Again, several quotes are changed incorrectly (incorrect inclusion of text that is not in quote).

I guess some other editor will have to review each of those quotes, and double-check that they match the wording from the source.

confocaloid wrote: February 27th, 2024, 2:44 am https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?diff ... did=146166

Again, several quotes are changed incorrectly (incorrect inclusion of text that is not in quote).

I found some minor formatting inconsistencies, but no actual misquotes I think. What were the "several quotes"? Specifics would be useful -- maybe I missed something in my review.

I did find three quotes that contained extra sentences, but those were sentences that had been added by David Eppstein in a later revision of the list. They were already marked as such by invisible comments in the article source, so they weren't anything that had been changed recently.

The current references don't seem to point to all of the "Added" quotations, so I didn't check those; maybe a specific archive.org date stamp should be added to explain where those all came from?

Here's the edit summary for my clean-up edit just now:

dvgrn wrote:Added missing rule B34/S45678 to Removed section (it was in the original archive). Checked the 22 quotations for the 23 original rules. Some had sentences marked with comments saying that they were added in a later version; moved these out to separate quotes marked "added later". All were otherwise correct. Patched some minor formatting issues in "Added" and "Removed" sections, but these could still be reviewed -- I didn't find where some of these quotes came from.

There's also weird edge cases to think about, like this post:

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3040&p=177400#p177400

Despite quoting a message posted by Rattlesnake, I wasn't quoting a single word of what they said - so I edited the quote header to say dvgrn and point to his user profile instead.