Talk:Butterfly hasslers

Are these hassler pages really needed?

See LifeWiki:Tiki bar#Alternatives to hassler pages. Are pages for every hassled object really needed? Being an "X hassler" is ill-defined enough, this puts oscilators of the same period on multiple pages, and this puts unrelated engines on the same page (different symmetric arrangements of hassled objects). Confocal (talk) 17:08, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm fine with the existing ones, but I don't think we need pages that contain just a few entries. HotdogPi (talk) 17:42, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Yup, I'm also pretty happy with the way the hassler pages have worked out so far. Each individual oscillator on one of these pages might not be particularly notable, but the collection of objects in this way is very useful. For any given candidate new oscillator, it's fairly easy to find the correct hassler page to check if the oscillator is known and/or has already been added to the collection. Every now and then, a group of individual oscillator articles might be combined into a "hassler" collection article, once the number of oscillators reaches some critical mass (more than two, anyway.)

A proliferation of hassler collection pages with a very small number of oscillators in each would be a step in the wrong direction, especially if we started seeing pages for "Nameless Active Object #23 Hasslers" and such. But I don't think we've started down that slippery slope yet. As long as the active object being hassled has a commonly used name and is fairly recognizable, we should be good.

I wouldn't say that being an "X hassler" is especially ill-defined. As with many definitions, there are no doubt some interesting edge cases, but they certainly don't invalidate the concept. For most cases, the question "is this oscillator an X hassler or not?" will have a clear and uncontested answer, and that's all that's needed here. Dvgrn (talk) 12:27, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

The general notion "X hassler" is not well-defined as a category. I think grouping by period is more reliable as a way of classifying oscillators. Confocal (talk) 18:52, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

According to Special:LongPages, the longest "hassler pages" are Traffic light hasslers, Honey farm hasslers and Pi-heptomino hasslers. The best alternative I could think of so far is to make a page titled 'Period-N oscillators' for medium N. The period is more of an objective property of an oscillator than being an "X hassler". Confocal (talk) 16:00, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia says the suggested split size is 60-100 KB, which only one of the three has hit (and that one's longer than it should be because there are more raw RLEs and fewer pnames). In addition, these hassler pages are less likely to be read from beginning to end than a typical article, making length less of an issue. We already split common periods of specific hasslers into their own pages. HotdogPi (talk) 16:05, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

I think I was the one that did many of splits of common periods of hasslers into pages like Period-42 pi-heptomino hasslers. I think it might be reasonable to prefer combined form like "Period-42 oscillators" in future. Confocal (talk) 16:29, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

With all due respect, Confocal, your alternative would be a horrible idea. Such a list would either list every known oscillator known whose period is within the "medium" range (which, needless to say, would be way longer than most of the hassler pages), or only list certain oscillators (LCMs, hasslers, billard tables, etc.), which would be little different than lumping a bunch of "Category:Oscillators with period N" pages together. C28 (talk) 16:17, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

That does not accurately reflect my suggestion. You're misunderstood my suggestion.
I'm not suggesting to put all medium-period oscillators on a single page. Instead, I'm suggesting to make a separate page for every medium period with sufficiently many known engines.
Also, I'm not suggesting to add every known oscillator, but only notable ones. Confocal (talk) 16:24, 18 August 2023 (UTC)