OCA talk:EightFlock

A separate page

Re: proposed merge: currently the page "Flock" is already long (5345 bytes). I think creating sections for "variants" would increase clutter, not reduce it. Compare with Maze (four infoboxes on a single long page), tlife (three infoboxes on a single long page). My preference would be to have several short pages, each of which gives a reasonably good answer to one specific question, making it easy to answer by giving a direct link to that page, and also making it straightforward to categorize each page according to its single subject. // There is also the problem of deciding which rule should be viewed as "the main rule" and which ones should count as "variants" - objectively, B3/S12 and B3/S128 are two distinct rules, without a single best way to decide which one is a "variant" of the other one. Confocal (talk) 14:20, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

And on the contrary, I prefer fewer long pages to more short pages. Explosion of small articles dilutes interesting information, and for a casual reader who has no definite target to search for, they may not have enough time to browse many pages before going bored. There are two ways to increase information density: one, to merge pages on similar topics; two, to elaborate every topic on individual pages. Ideally we expect the latter way, but before sufficiently many materials are gathered to back up the standalone notability, I will resort to the former. // The main/variant distinction will indeed be difficult to tell if there are more different transition rules, but this case has only one (S8) and its influence to pattern behaviour is small. Moreover, EightFlock is the prefix "Eight-" added to Flock, rendering EightFlock as a modification to Flock and not the other way around. (EightLife is the same prefix added to Life, but I agree that it deserves its own page for its multiple Life-incompatible objects per previous argument.) GUYTU6J (talk) 15:18, 27 November 2022 (UTC)