BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

No, the charactery change *was* illegal; this CfJ upholds it, enshrines it. It doesn’t matter if it’s getting overwritten; the historical record should reflect that an illegal action was carried out, not that it was a legal action as adjudged by CfJ.

Strongly considering a petulant early AGAINST vote on this as the whole debate is sort of silly and unnecessary, and a never-ending cycle of retaliatory CfJs on ever-finer slices of what individual words mean is not my idea of a fun time. I’ll vote FOR this if it is just upholding my enactment because why not; anything else is just inviting further headache imo.

@Josh: this isn’t a debate about individual words, so much as a debate about how to interpret the core rules, which is something that I’m interested in.

I don’t think your enactment of the CFJ is a possible way to interpret it – it specifically reverted the ruleset to a particular version, not to the version that the ruleset should have been in at the time that the tracking page had that version. You’re interpreting the CFJ as “revert the ruleset to the state it was in at the time that the ruleset tracking page said [link]” which is a lot more complicated than what the CFJ actually said to do.

I’m very opposed to your interpretation simply because it would make the entire CFJ system unusable if CFJs are being interpreted as changing the ruleset to something other than what they specifically say they’re changing the ruleset to. I think it’d make the game close to unplayable if “revert the ruleset to X” can be interpreted as changing the ruleset to anything other than “X” – either it fails, or it changes the ruleset to X, but interpreting it as doing something else doesn’t make any sense. If we can’t rely on proposals and CFJs to do what they say they do, how could we play the game at all?

(Note that with my FOR vote on the CFJ, I specifically noted that the CFJ was changing to a historically incorrect / impossible gamestate – I voted FOR not because the CFJ was correcting an incorrection, but because it brought the game back to a known playable state. Voting FOR a CFJ doesn’t necessarily mean that you think it is leaving the gamestate unchanged.)

To be clear – after our previous discussion, I now think that most likely the original CFJ was unenactable, which is why a second CFJ is needed.

I’m really not going to get drawn into what you want to debate here - this CfJ has the effect of stating that the correct text of the rule includes the word “charactery”, as for your revertion of the revertion to be legal it would have to be putting the ruleset into a compliant state. I will not support that and I will not further debate what “revert” means and how to correctly apply it as an instruction. The terms for my vote on this are simple.

You attempted to enact a CFJ that specifically stated to revert the ruleset to a state that includes the word “charactery”! How can that not be the correct state of the ruleset after the CFJ is enacted?

I am not going to argue the meaning of the word “revert” again. I’m not going to explain that a wiki edit can contain two actions within it again. We have been over all of this already.

We’re going round in circles. 

I agree that we’re going round in circles, but I don’t see why that should be.

I suspect I’m not going to be able to convince you on this, but setting out the argument for the benefit of other CFJ on this:

Josh performed two actions in the same wiki edit: a) attempting to enact a CFJ that reverts the ruleset to a particular version; b) attempting to correct the ruleset tracker by reverting an illegal action.

My argument is that performing a) made b) illegal (which is why I reverted it). “Representations of the Gamestate”, the rule that allows reversion of illegal edits, says “If a Participant feels that a representation of the gamestate (such as a wiki page) does not match the gamestate, they may [...] undo the effects of any alteration that led to it, if that alteration did not follow the rules at the time it was made.”

Enacting the CFJ reverted the ruleset to a particular version; if the CFJ could be legally enacted, the ruleset therefore had that version (because reverting it to any other version wouldn’t be following the instructions in the CFJ). As a consequence, if the CFJ were enacted by reverting the wiki page to the stated version (the first of the two edits that Josh combined), it would not be possible for the representation of the ruleset on the tracking page to not match the ruleset. This means that the second of the two edits that Josh combined, the action of changing the ruleset tracker to match the ruleset, would not be possible to perform legally, which is why I reverted it.

And by “other CFJ on this” I meant “other voters on this CFJ”.

For the sake of other players:

My view is that Reading Rainbow will put the ruleset into a legally compliant state. It may have got there due to one or more illegal actions having been performed along the way - depending on your interpretation, one of JonathanDark’s charactery edit, my reversion of that edit, my enactment of the CfJ, and/or ais’ reversion of my reversion of JonathanDark’s edit.

This CfJ does not cause the game to be in an entirely compliant state as it requires that at least one illegal action be enshrined as having been legally performed.

I don’t think it matters very much as, should Reading Rainbow or something similar be enacted, none of the illegal actions will have had material effect on either the ruleset or the gamestate, so it can’t be used to unpick any subsequent actions. As such I feel confident that this can fail with no ill effect.

It can also pass without must significant real effect. It may even be that after Reading Rainbow passes it would have no effect on the ruleset or gamestate and could be failed automatically.

It can’t be failed automatically, because it requests to uphold an action.

For what it’s worth, I believe that “charactery” was not introduced by JonathanDark’s edit, but (if the original CFJ was actually enacted) was introduced by CFJ enactment, and couldn’t then be removed from the ruleset by attempting to revert JonathanDark’s edit, because that wasn’t the edit that introduced the word into the ruleset in the first place.

I don’t think putting the game into an entirely compliant state is necessarily the goal of CFJs – I voted for the original CFJ on the basis that I knew it would put the game into a noncompliant state, but at least it would be a consistent state that would allow us to all agree on what the rules were, and it wasn’t meaningfully different from the “correct” state at the time. That’s why I reacted so strongly to Josh’s subsequent revert – it was, essentially, undermining the entire CFJ system by discarding the effect of the CFJ we had passed (and I am still very angry about that). It is definitely reasonable to argue that the original CFJ shouldn’t have passed (I was strongly considering voting against it on the basis that it would change the ruleset to a state other than the state it “should be in”), but now that it was, I think we should continue from the ruleset that the CFJ placed us in; interpreting the ruleset as being anything else is, in effect, ignoring the judgement made by the CFJ.

Anyway, the primary reason to vote FOR this CFJ is that it closes off a core rules scam – if the CFJ was not legally enacted then the enactment could be reverted to place the CFJ into a pending state, and combining a legal action with an illegal action makes both illegal (“One wiki update may contain one or more alterations, [...] as long as [...] the alterations are otherwise legal.”) This means that some time many months from now, perhaps in a later dynasty, an admin could undo the enactment, then enact the CFJ correctly, in order to do a large-scale revert of the ruleset.

(The main reason I originally made the CFJ, though, is the imperial style of “will correct gamestate errors” – it would be contrary to style to leave an obvious error uncorrected, even though it’s likely to become moot if “Reading Rainbow” passes.)

So, my stance is that I believe Josh’s change to have been fully legal, and it’s what I’d expected once people were confirming that not only was the cfj right to revert it, but that earlier changes were also illegal. I voted saying we should go further, Habanero explicitly said we should revert charactery, and, well, Josh is the one that reverted further. That’s the vast majority of FOR voters that expected and wanted it.

I do not share the fears that voting against this would allow a core rules scam to revert whole dynasties away back to this point in time. A successful future DoV would cause the results of these cfjs would be auto-upheld, which would stop them from being reopened. It’s literally the whole point of the DoV auto-uphold, and if we make an assumption that a DoV can be overturned by someone reopening and re-enacting an old CfJ, that would defeat the whole point of it.

However, that said, because I’d much rather have the ruleset just be in a state which is upheld, even if it’s not technically the state I believe to be correct. I’d care more, but the rule is literally going to be replaced.

@SingularByte: I forgot about the DoV auto-uphold. You’re right, that would block the scam.

I guess my position here is that a) I agree with the general consensus that reverting “charactery” too is the “correct” resolution of the situation that the CFJ was discussing, but b) the wording of a CFJ overrides the sentiments of the voters, and the CFJ specified a revision of the ruleset that included “charactery”. In a way, the “correct” resolution of the situation would have been to vote against the CFJ rather than for it, and then just revert the ruleset/gamestate manually due to the consensus on what it was.

Or to put it another way: even though we all know what the rules should be, that’s different from what the rules (and CFJ) actually say, and if a CFJ passes we have to live with the gamestate it creates. If Josh hadn’t locked the edit window, I would have considered making this CFJ apply a further revert in order to make the original CFJ moot.

I was trying to get you to acknowledge a further problem which you steadfastly refused to do, chosing instead to relitigate previous disagreements over and over again.

It’d worth considering a glossary definition for what “revert” means, if this continues.

I apologize for using a charged word like “revert”. I could swear it was simple enough to pick a previous wiki version and say “revert to this version” and that we had done that before.

I agree that it should be a relatively clear read, JD.

I would definitely add this to both the glossary and the rules for CfJs so people like me don’t mess it up in the future. My original intention was for a simple rollback of the gamestate to a previous state, and even if that state was illegal at the time it was first created, it still existed in the wiki history as gamestate. I’m pretty sure wiki history itself is gamestate. Another CfJ to roll it back further to a more acceptable gamestate was all that was needed if it was controversial.

Not particularly convinced by ais’ argument here for reasons given by Josh

@Josh: I should probably write an essay about CFJs – I’ve been meaning to for a while.

The problem in this case is that a CFJ is both a) a way for the playerbase to discuss what the ruleset/gamestate should be and how to resolve a dispute, and b) a voting mechanism via which we can ensure everyone agrees on what the current ruleset/gamestate is, by changing the ruleset/gamestate to the majority opinion.

Normally those two purposes are aligned with each other, but this time, we came to an agreement during the CFJ voting that the ruleset should be at the 26 January 07:05 version, but the CFJ actually stated to revert the ruleset to the 26 January 21:05 version, and yet passed rather than failing. So we worked out what the ruleset was supposed to be, and then passed a CFJ to make it something different. That means that something has gone wrong with the way that players are interacting with the CFJ system (in that a CFJ that reverts “halfway” is actually making the problem worse rather than better, because it in effect upholds the changes it isn’t reversing).

Practically speaking, I don’t see the need for this CfJ any longer if Reading Rainbow is going to get us where we need to be. 

EAV/CoV JonathanDark is right – this CFJ doesn’t accomplish anything useful any more, assuming “Reading Rainbow” passes, so it doesn’t really matter whether it’s enacted or failed.

I do think there’s an important underlying issue of core rules interpretation/principle here (i.e. “after a CFJ enactment changes the rules, you can’t then perform actions based on the old version of the rules prior to the CFJ, even if everyone agrees that they would take the game closer to the correct pre-CFJ gamestate and were legal under the pre-CFJ rules”), but this CFJ seems unlikely to resolve it.

Exactly. Let’s instead propose a fix to the Glossary and CfJ rules to clarify this.