The first three changes seem good. The last looks like a fountain of scams via deliberately delayed gamestate document updates.

How does it vary in that regard from the existing text, which states “any alteration of that gamestate as a result of a City Architect’s action is (and can only be) applied by editing that data”?

“A City Architect should not deliberately and unreasonably prolong the performance of a game action once they have started it.”

A gamestate change can be a “result” of an action without actually being part of it.

Mm, sounds transparently incorrect to be but what do I know? Greentick

Bucky, again, that interpretation (if it holds) would apply as much to the current text as to my proposed change.

I have to be honest, I don’t love the new text tremendously more than the old text, but the reason I wrote it that way was precisely to preserve functionality while making the legal distinction between an applied and an unapplied change more obvious. So unless you can explain how there is some difference in the two cases, I don’t get the thrust of your objection. I would happily vote for a new and improved way of handling things, but in the meantime, I don’t understand what you see as the downside of making this change.

The first change seems an aesthetically detrimental one, nobody (least of all a potential new player looking at the ruleset for the first time) needs to have some minutiae of URL validity at the forefront of their mind.

The second one I don’t follow - what is the difference between a legal action and an authorised one? What would a legal but unauthorised action look like?

The third does seem mild at first glance, although I’m travelling and can’t go through the ruleset to see how it squares up to the parts of the ruleset that care about incorrect gamestate.

1. Suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree.

2. First, the noun in this case is “changes”, not “action”, just to be clear about what is being modified. Second, the modification is not from “legal changes” to “authorised changes”, but from “legal changes that have been made” to “legal changes that have been authorised to be made”. So the real modification I make is in relation to TENSE.

What does the current clause “the ruleset does not properly reflect all legal changes that have been made to it” say to you? “Have been made” is past tense. So this text authorises us to make the ruleset “reflect” changes that have already been made. But “any alteration of that gamestate as a result of a City Architect’s action is (and can only be) applied by editing that data”. “And can only be” means that changes cannot be made until the point the edit is made. So “legal changes that have been made” to the ruleset but which the document does not “reflect” is a contradiction in terms. There are no legal changes that are not already reflected. The appendix insists upon it.

So going from “legal changes that have been made” to “legal changes that have been authorised to be made”, in combination with the appendix change, makes it clear that we are not talking about a change which has already been accomplished, but one which is to be accomplished. The alternative would be to suggest that in between the enactment of a proposal and the change of the ruletext, we are already bound to the changed text, which seems to be the situation that the “can only be” phrase is meant to avoid. So this rule change, in essence, brings the wording of our SOLE LEGAL BASIS for changing the rules in response to a passed proposal or CfJ into alignment both with the intention of the rules and our actual practice.

3. I haven’t cross-referenced every single line of the rules myself, but I have been considering this issue for a year and a half, and I’m convinced that it has no effect except to render more explicit the distinction we maintain between gamestate and its representation, while preserving the prohibition on allowing people to modify the representation ad hoc.

By the way, I have raised the interpretation I explain in point 2 in discord 3-4 times, and no one has yet presented a counter-argument. I invite anyone who thinks this proposal isn’t necessary to pretend they have never played a nomic before. Go through the rules de novo and see if you can establish under what conditions a legal change to the rules or its representation can be made. I am completely sincere when I say I would really like to hear someone make a coherent argument as to why they think it’s legal to update the wiki to reflect a change “that has been made” if the change “can only be made” by updating the wiki.

This has been a tricky one to vote for since it’s such fundamental rules, but I *think* it all works out better than the current ruleset. I can’t work out how I’d go about scamming it (if I were to ignore fair play), so it seems solid enough.

Does allowing anyone to apply legal but unaccomplished edits open any cracks where a rule authorises an optional action and another player (who can’t personally perform it) can step in to apply it under the terms of “does not reflect all legal changes that have been authorised to be made to it” even if the authorised person didn’t want to do that?

I suppose I’m a little unclear on what “authorised” means here. It feels like it’s doubling itself up a bit. A rule of “Peter may repeal this rule” is authorising that decision as one that can be made by Peter - and the action of Peter saying “good morning everyone, I will now repeal this rule, one second while I pour myself a coffee first” is Peter authorising that repeal as a future event, such that a third party could step in to perform that repeal before Peter poured his coffee?

Hi Kevan, I’m not sure I have the same difficulty in this regard, but in any case, I firmly believe this is strictly better than not being allowed to make any changes to the rules that have not already been made, in that it obeys general principles of causality and temporality.

If you want to clean up the wording further, I strongly encourage you to do so! But in the meantime, I think we’re much better off having made this change.