Monday, November 06, 2023

Proposal: Immutability [Appendix]

Timed out, 1-3. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 09 Nov 2023 00:23:01 UTC

In the rule “Keywords”, remove the following from the definition of “Gamestate”:

All wiki pages that the Dynastic Rules explicitly mention (except for dynastic histories and discussion pages) and any images or Templates contained within (or indirectly invoked by Templates contained within) those Wiki Pages are assumed to be Gamestate.

Add a new keyword after “Hiatus” called “Immutable” as follows:

If something is immutable, it may not be edited or changed by any Wizard or the Battle Master except where permitted by the ruleset. All wiki pages that the Dynastic Rules explicitly mention (except for dynastic histories and discussion pages) and any images or Templates contained within (or indirectly invoked by Templates contained within) those wiki pages are Immutable.

Add the following to the end of the rule “Representations of the Gamestate”:

If a wiki page is named in the ruleset as the designated location for tracking some particular gamestate, any Wizard or the Battle Master may edit that wiki page even if it would otherwise be immutable so long as the edited version of the page remains an accurate representation of the gamestate.

Per our brief discussion on Discord, only information can be gamestate, and wiki pages are merely used to represent that information. Then the phrase “the wiki page xyz is gamestate” doesn’t really mean anything despite people using it to mean that the page shouldn’t be edited. This adds an actual class of thing that actually shouldn’t be edited under any circumstances, with an exception for representations of gamestate.

posted by Zack at 06 Nov 2023 20:15:00 UTC Comments (6)

Comments

Kevan: he/him

06-11-2023 22:38:33 UTC

Doesn’t the fact that you’re restricting the alteration of those wiki pages make them count as gamestate in their entirety again (under the definition of gamestate as “Any information which the Ruleset regulates the alteration of”)?

I don’t know if this would short-circuit the ruleset’s existing assertion that “The wiki merely represents the Gamestate tracked there, and is not the same thing.”, or if a gamestate-tracking wiki page would be harmlessly considered a piece of gamestate that happened to contain a description of a second piece of gamestate.

Bucky:

07-11-2023 05:56:31 UTC

against

Zack: he/him

07-11-2023 18:03:31 UTC

A wiki page is not itself information, it’s just a place where information is written down, so to claim that any particular wiki page “is gamestate” or “counts as gamestate” is meaningless. Often we say a wiki page “is gamestate” when we really mean it shouldn’t be edited because it is the designated place to track some gamestate, and we don’t want people randomly changing it or adding unrelated stuff. The true gamestate is the abstract information is represented on the page.

Clucky: he/him

07-11-2023 22:27:24 UTC

I think “this wiki page is gamestate” is a perfectly find shorthand way of saying “the information on this wiki page is gamestate”  against

Kevan: he/him

07-11-2023 23:11:30 UTC

[Zack] Saying that a wiki page “is gamestate” does have some meaning - Rule 1.1 tells us that such a page “can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset”.

It is murky that we informally regard such a wiki page as being both its game data (which is sacrosanct) and the visual scaffolding around that such as headings, font colours and decorative emoji (freely created and sometimes modified without the ruleset’s explicit guidance, which is technically breaking a rule).

That could use a fix, but I don’t think this is that fix. By saying that the entirety of a wiki page is immutable and “may not be edited or changed by any Wizard”, that fits the keyword definition of gamestate (“information which the Ruleset regulates the alteration of”) so you’re still saying, in a more roundabout way, that such a wiki page is gamestate.

against

Zack: he/him

08-11-2023 18:25:22 UTC

If we accept that saying a specific wiki page is gamestate means the contents of that page are gamestate, and “the wiki merely represents the Gamestate tracked there, and is not the same thing”, then what gamestate information is that wiki page representing? It must be representing the information represented by itself at the time it was made gamestate. I think that’s backwards and too murky. I think it would be better if there was a clear distinction between gamestate, which is information about the current state of the game, and wiki pages, which may be mutable or immutable representations of that information. You’re right that by making a wiki page immutable the information on that page would become gamestate, but that’s by design. It would be gamestate because the ruleset regulates its alteration, not because we declared it so.