Talk:46P22

This morning's scan of alterations in LifeWiki reveals numerous notability denunciations, which is certainly preferable to last fortnight's series of "delete" vandalisms. In fact, there is much to be said for this point of view, since the content of LifeWiki seems to consist of illustrations of Life patterns found on many of the other well known sources. Those sources are largely historical, reporting new Life objects as they were discovered. Of course, it was not simply another object, but the context in which it was found - smallest so and so, longest lived, easily synthesized, or what not. In the course of time not only did the number of objects grow, but relationships between them emerged. Thus adjectives such as long, bi, pseudo, and the like were applied.

One wonders whether snake, long snake, long long snake, extra long snale, nthlong snake all merit separate pages, notable or not as they may be. In the present instance, it seems that there are numerous oscillators whose only claim to fame is their mass and period, which have not yet been baptized with textual names (The syntax of naming objects is another issue).

Simply deleting "unnotable" objects may not be such a good idea, because other pages may want to refer to them. So at least their images should continue to occupy a place in the data base. If that could be assured, then creating pages treating groups of related objects would be a reasonable way to reduce the overall number of pages without sacrificing the number of illustrations or the discussion of variants.

The pages marked as unnotable were marked by Sokwe, the original author of many (all?) of the pages that were marked -- it's not vandalism. I don't plan on removing the images themselves as (like you said) they may be useful in the future. But many of the pages were marked for good reason -- this one for example is "the third smallest period 22 oscillator", which isn't particularly noteworthy, really.

Sokwe has done a great job of creating pages outlining all of the spaceships for a given speed (see c/3 orthogonal, for example). If people felt so inclined, they could potentially set up a similar series of articles for oscillators, though that would be a considerable amount of work. For organizational purposes and whatnot, I think it's a lot easier to keep the standard format of one page per object with slight modifications on that same page. I have no real objection to merging the long snake and long long snake onto the page for snake though, and perhaps other similar mergings. Nathaniel 20:37, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

There are some oscillators that I added for bad reasons. These patterns have very little (or no) application, and so they are not important to other articles on the wiki. In the future I will try to be more careful when making new pattern pages.
~Sokwe 22:27, 14 September 2009 (UTC)