So will this just be a turn based dynasty then?

I don’t know what it’ll be. So far it’s about submitting secret route orders and having them processed simultaneously, but it could have turn-based subgames if people proposed them.

All this proposal is doing is recording something that I already said upon Ascension: that my Imperial Style will include opposing any mechanics that overtly reward or punish players for being online or offline at particular times.

(Actually “reward or punish players for being online or offline at particular times” is probably a better definition, I’ll edit it to use that.)

I continue to think that requiring proposals for this is a bad idea and that edits to the page should just be allowed unconditionally. I probably won’t vote against just because of that – because the edit itself is reasonable – but using a slot for this every dynasty seems wrong, and it discourages people from trying to do a major overhaul of the page.

I think that although the last sentence probably works on an admin-discretion basis, it would be clearer if it specified that the phrase should be replaced with a link, rather than writing out the wikimarkup for a link. (A few dynasties ago, we had a proposal using similar wording that wanted to place the actual punctuation into the rule, rather than the wiki’s interpretation of that punctuation – and that implies to me that that sort of proposal wording is likely to be ambiguous, as either meaning could be desirable.)

Incidentally, the original removal of the linking was actually illegal – the proposal that introduced the phrase in question was clear that it was supposed to be linked, and was accidentally added in unlinked form by the enacting admin even though that violated the instructions in the proposal. It has, however, probably been auto-upheld by DoV since (although some interpretations of “uphold” may imply that the link in question is in the ruleset currently, because upholding an action doesn’t necessarily imply upholding the accompanying tracker edit).

Yes, I remember, we voted on unconditionally editing the Styles page just last week.

I think replacing one string with another string is completely clear and unambiguous. If we instead say to replace it with “a link”, an admin unfamiliar with wiki code might implement that in a needlessly unusual way.

And yes, I’m adding the link back by proposal because its accidental illegal removal was upheld.

The ambiguity is as to whether the link is changed within the source code of the wiki page, or within the text of the rule (thus forcing the ruleset page to use nowiki tags to render it correctly). I normally disambiguate by saying “where * represents the start of a list item” or the like (although in the case of lists, it isn’t necessary in most dynasties because ASCII asterisks and proper list markup are interchangeable) – this could likewise say “where the square brackets represent the wikimarkup for a link”.

Another way to think about it is that it’s ambiguous whether the proposal is written in formatted text or in wikimarkup. Imagine a proposal that said “In ‘Victory and Ascension’, change ‘Imperial Style, which if specified’ to ‘[[Imperial Style]], which if specified’”. I think this would unambiguously put the square brackets into the text of the rule (i.e. treating them as ruletext rather than markup), because if you treat them as markup you then have to put the italics into the page source, which isn’t possible.

As it is, I think there’s generally no ruleset-based reason to expect proposals to be written in wikimarkup other than it commonly happens. The only thing in the ruleset indicating that the ruleset is tracked using a wiki page is “This document is considered to be, in effect, the only Ruleset for BlogNomic, so long as it is located at at the URL https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=Ruleset.”, which probably doesn’t have the desired effect (and is probably just a false statement – the content of the ruleset doesn’t always match the content of the ruleset tracker, e.g. if a proposal is mis-adminned). So when it’s ambiguous as to whether a proposal is written in wikimarkup or formatted text, I think a strict rules interpretation tends to favour the latter.

I see nothing wrong with this Proposal, and the whole link replacement issue is just covering the bases.

. (Re: the debate about whether the link syntax is clear, I would be in favour of formalising the apparent de facto standard of “except where otherwise stated, changes to gamestate tracked on wiki pages are written in wikitext” in the Appendix, but I definitely don’t trust myself to write it.)

Honestly, the ambiguity around links etc. is probably one of those things where we could build rules around it, but while it’s ambiguious, people do generally err on the side of doing it as intended. Wilfully choosing to interpret a link as not being a link would just be unhelpful and of no benefit to the enacting admin.