BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Side-by-side diff:

* You’re replacing “wiki pages that the Dynastic Rules explicitly mention (except for dynastic histories and discussion pages)” with “wiki pages that the Ruleset mentions by name or links to”, and
* Adding “the contents of such pages may otherwise be a mixture of gamestate and non-gamestate”.

Does “mentions by name” open up anything that “explicitly mention” doesn’t, or do they both have about the same heft in an argument over whether a “surprise, this page I wrote last year is now gamestate” scam works? (eg. the current ruleset includes the phrase “the table”, which could be argued as making the old wiki page The Table gamestate again.)

Limiting it to just “links to” would make a lot of sense, although we’d have to get stricter about making sure that proposals to create wiki pages actually put the markup in (or that admins are allowed to add the markup where it’s obviously intended).

Widening this to core also makes the FAQ gamestate, which seems like it should be exempted.

I think it makes sense for the pages to be used to track gamestate rather than to actually be gamestate, generally. Although it depends on what they’re used for.

@Kevan:

Does “mentions by name” open up anything that “explicitly mention” doesn’t, or do they both have about the same heft in an argument over whether a “surprise, this page I wrote last year is now gamestate” scam works? (eg. the current ruleset includes the phrase “the table”, which could be argued as making the old wiki page The Table gamestate again.)

Good point; have made it just links.

I think I’m okay with the FAQ page being gamestate, given that its contents still won’t be. All making the page gamestate does is oblige us to have an FAQ page.

soft

I’m worried that ” and any images or Templates contained within those Wiki Pages are assumed to be Gamestate” would prevent you from updating templates to better represent the gamestate if the templates themselves are gamestate.

@Clucky that’s in the current text

(The current text: Any information which the Ruleset regulates the alteration of. All wiki pages that the Dynastic Rules explicitly mention (except for dynastic histories and discussion pages) and any images or Templates contained within those Wiki Pages are assumed to be Gamestate.)

How are players meant to tell (or rule-writers meant to express) the difference between a page like the FAQ which is gamestate but contains no gamestate, and a page like the EFF Wordlist which is gamestate and it’s very important that all the words are gamestate as well?

I think the existing faultline we’ve built along has been between pages which are gamestate (you’d probably get told off if you even tried to add bullet points to a corpora list) and pages which track gamestate (like a dynasty’s game page, where we don’t mind about the formatting being improved - although even that is relatively recent, I guess, only being an option post-GNDT). We should definitely reflect that in how the ruleset actually talks about gamestate pages, but I’m not sure “may otherwise be a mixture” really sheds enough guiding light.

I think that if the information is regulated in some way by the ruleset then it’s gamestate. It might require that rule-writers be a bit more specific in writing rules (“The word list on the EFF Wordlist wiki page” rather than “The contents of the EFF Wordlist wiki page”) but it seems easy enough to work around, for me.

The last time we used the EFF list, the rule said “A name, which is randomly selected from the EFF Wordlist” with a wiki link to that page - which shakes out to “the page is gamestate but the words aren’t, so anyone can change them”, under your proposed rule?

That sounds like it doesn’t work as expected to fall back on the base-level definition of gamestate as “any information which the Ruleset regulates the alteration of”. The reason that “oh, also any relevant wiki pages” is in the definition is because we don’t always build mechanics that directly alter those pages, but we still want them to be protected.

Something like “all content on gamestate pages is 100% gamestate unless the ruleset explicitly refers to information being ‘tracked’ on that page, in which case only the tracked elements are gamestate” might be closer to how we’ve been using wiki pages in practice?

Seems a bad idea that saying “the wordlist page is gamestate” would now fail to make any of its contents gamestate, under this proposal.

Josh’s reassurance that we just have remember to write “The word list on the EFF Wordlist wiki page” rather than “The contents of the EFF Wordlist wiki page” (and that I had to double-check which way around he said that, and don’t understand it) is not very compelling.

SK but this will need another pass. Probably by someone else, as I want to concentrate on dynastic proposals for the next little while.