I didn’t really follow Clucky’s “you won’t be able to edit it before sharing your style” angle, on that. From the page’s history, I can’t see that any Emperor has ever done this.

The page being regular gamestate sends a clear signal about the authority of its current text (it’s something that a quorum endorsed at some point), and how to edit it (you make a proposal). If it’s free text, the authority is eroded, and new players will have to guess at the process and etiquette of amending entries.

Some of the voters in the quorum are endorsing it only because it won’t be gamestate and thus won’t have that authority, as a feature rather than a bug. I actually agree with Josh that Imperial Styles should be a general guideline and should not have the weight of authority.

Other than the authoritativeness, is the main complaint here that the editability is not regulated? If so, we could explicitly define the mechanism for it just for Imperial Styles. I sympathize with the potential confusion of having an Emperor declare their style to be “Proposal Separatist”, and then sometime later in that dynasty someone edits the page to rename or even remove the “Proposal Separatist” definition, thus removing any meaning to the initial declaration in the AA.

I think the main point is that, based on the comments in Cooperative Emperor Style, it’s not desired to give the page too much weight. Handling the mechanism for editing that page can be a separately-addressed concern.

My main reservation is that this sets up an additional, unwritten set of rules for how to edit a page that relates to the game, where players old and new are expected to intuit the etiquette. The page isn’t really freely editable - if I blank the whole thing then somebody will put the content back. But if I think a Style is unhelpful, can I knock some words out of it or delete it? Should I ask on the Discord first? Even as a regular player I don’t know the answer to that.

If we want a mechanism for editing the page, the existing default “make a proposal to amend gamestate” seems like it does the job. Players who have ideas can float them, ascending Emperors who want to tweak a style or coin a new one can declare that anyway in the Ascension Address (“I’m Protective except I won’t factor in future players, also I’m a Storyteller, which means I’ll be making regular narrative posts”) and propose the edit later if they think it’s worth recording.

Setting expectations for a game is a basis for respect, to gamify it or otherwise preventing changes in the moment seems irresponsible; that’s why I don’t want it be authoritative, definitive, or locked down. If someone wants to spam, delete, or otherwise screw up that page, so be it; that someone is intentionally being a bad actor with disrespect for us: if they want to be a bad actor, there’s many avenues, and this seems like one of the least concerning ones.

On the other hand, if an emperor needs a new way to define their style, which is the most common use case, by not locking it down, this is an option available to them. Or if a player interpreting these styles has a question, we can talk about it informally, then update the page with an approximate answer.

Overall, it’s not a big deal, and shouldn’t be, so to make it require quorum is… silly, in my opinion.

Finally… If you don’t like a change someone else made; you can revert it back yourself also. If we have a case where this continually happens under the guise of respect, we can talk about it, but until that circumstance: imperial styles are still entirely optional to even use, and anyone can change it back to the way it was, or even better, merge what they want to see said with what the other person said, building an informal consensus on these informal styles.

It’s not a big deal, the point is to remind new emperors that many players like to know generally how the emperor will play as a social expectation, and equally, give emperors the idea that they don’t have to play every dynasty the same way.

That makes sense to me. There’s no reason that, if players find the editing of Imperial Styles confusing, they can’t just ask. We don’t engage in BlogNomic in a vacuum.

The most likely scenario is that each Emperor will simply examine the page at the start of their dynasty, see if it mostly fits their needs, tweak it if they feel like it needs tweaking, and then add their styles to their AA if they want to.

If a player then later wants to refer to the page, and someone has maliciously blanked it or edited it to misrepresent the Emperor’s stated style, they can bring it up and ask “what does this mean?” or “are you really following this style?” and the active players and Emperor can discuss it and recover the intended style wording on that page. No harm no foul, thanks to wiki edit history.

The most common Style scenario so far has been an Emperor picking some Styles without tweaking any of them, and probably not re-reading the descriptions in detail. If somebody made some minor but crucial edits to Scam-Neutral today and a future Emperor picked it as their usual style without a close reading a few months from now, nobody during that future dynasty would think that they needed to double-check anything with the Emperor.

Putting such an edit through a proposal isn’t foolproof - the future Emperor might be idle during that dynasty and miss it -  but it helps, and means that any shifts in the tone of Emperorship is made in the open. The new “asks players to…” stuff may have bedded down better if it had been raised as a proposal to the group, with some feedback prior to writing it down.

I am looking at this again, and this feels like rule bloat. A simple sentence is enough to encourage emperors to state a style, and adding this that or the other thing… It doesn’t matter either way whether this page is gamestate or not; an emperor can state exact things in their theme. Finally, I don’t imagine the page will change much whether or not it needs a proposal to do so.