User:Apple Bottom/TODO

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Tools for writing articles:

Notes:

  • On Link* and Cite* templates: these exist not just to make linking to/citing certain sites easier, but also to avoid having to manually update hundreds (or thousands) of articles if a site moves.

General

TODO notes, ideas and so on, not necessarily just for myself.

  • Apple Bot:
    • User:Apple Bot needs bot and trusted flags.
    • Edit applebot.pl to also read Bob Shemyakin's glider synthesis list.
    • Perhaps equip the script with the ability to update these data files from the web (--update), and to suggest doing so if they aren't found.
    • Automatically editing articles to reflect the best known glider syntheses isn't a good idea, as Dvgrn points out: the synthesis RLEs would also have to be updated.
    • MediaWiki::Bot has various warts, including an inability to log in (see issue 83). The author writes that it is unmaintained, but patches are welcome. Consider submitting one.
  • Ongoing project: gather references on conwaylife.com.
    • Others are on this case.
  • Catagolue browser extension:
    • Put this on Github.
    • Consider adapting it for other browsers, e.g. Firefox. (Or invite others to fork the repo and submit pull requests.)
    • Finish the jslife work, and release a new version including that.
      • Well, it's not finished, but at least it's released.
    • Rowett asked about including the LifeViewer. Great idea, but for licensing reasons (GPL) this would require unobfuscated code for the LifeViewer, which is not currently available.
    • Chris_C suggested (here) automatically generating glider syntheses for still lifes.
    • More in the extension's own TODO file.
  • Glider synthesis generator CGI script:
    • Also basically Chris_C's suggestion. Something resembling Oscillizer, perhaps hosted on conwaylife.com? Someone else will have to handle this.
  • Catagolue-related scripts and files:
    • Beat these into shape and put them on Github as appropriate.
  • Catagolue:
    • Backups should go on archive.org.
    • Is there a public repo of the Catagolue codebase? Are pull requests accepted, e.g. to add a "list of all rules ever investigated" page?
  • NaiveLife.pm, image_gen:
    • Beat these into shape and put them on Github.

LifeWiki TODO

Current

  • The "Types of Greyships" section in Greyship needs to be updated/expanded. Several pages redirect to this; at the minimum all those terms should be mentioned and explained.
  • Methuselahs:
    • Methuselahs with lifespan less than 10,000 (see List of long-lived methuselahs) do not have f= and mcps= filled in in their infoboxes.
    • Various methuselahs are missing descriptions/censuses of their final patterns.
  • The various "category" templates (e.g. Template:OscillatorPeriod) all take differently-named parameters; this is confusing ("was it 't='? Or 'n='? Or 'c='? Or 's='? Or..."). Tweak all these to also (alternatively) accept a nameless parameter.
  • Template:GrowingSpaceship does not categorize (and thus has no supporting category infrastructure) based on the extra parameters, fs, bs, fp and bp.
    • Should it? Unlike with e.g. oscillators, it might well be that most of these categories would only contain one article, so there might be no point in having them.
    • Same for Template:MovingBreeder.
    • And quite a few others.
  • Software that needs articles:
    • osrc ("Preliminary attempt at a zfind-like oscillator searcher"), praosylen, [1]
    • ofind ("search for oscillators in semitotalistic cellular automata"), David Eppstein, [2]
    • lifelocallookahead (spaceship searcher), Andrew J. Wade, [3], [4]
  • In Template:Oscillator, separate oscillator-specific parameters (period, heat, volatility etc.) into an "Oscillator parameters" section (like "Pattern files" etc.), expanded by default.
  • User:Scotgot appears to have used strict volatility instead of volatility for the v= parameter when creating oscillator pages. Check every such page they created and correct any wrong numbers.
  • The cellular automaton article currently only talks about CAs defined on a square lattice. This needs to change; there are CAs on all sorts of tilings, both regular (hexagonal, triangular) and less regular (Penrose, hyperbolic, ...). We're currently fudging hexagonal tilings by defining a "hexagonal neighborhood" on the square lattice (e.g. creating a "bricklayer's tiling"); but while that's fine (software such as Golly does hexagonal CAs this way), it's essentially an implementation detail. It should be noted, but CAs should be treated more generally.
    • Related: the article currently goes on at length about both CAs in general and Life-like CAs in particular. This needs to be disentangled, and Life-like CAs given their own article that introduces the basic concepts as required to understand them and otherwise refers to the general cellular automaton article.
  • Modify external link templates to all take title=, name=, pagename= and patternname= (as synonyms). It's not very useful for the parameters to have different names in different templates. (And some users even use entirely non-existent parameters without even so much as checking whether they do in fact have an effect.)
  • For that matter, saner external link templates in general. No hidden surprises, no things that don't work (but should), no inconsistencies, no making-the-user-jump-through-hoops-to-use-them, and so on. (See Template talk:LinkForumThread.) Also, cleaner template code that is more conducive to being edited and doesn't present itself as a thorny thicket of punctuation.
  • Add an "identifiers" section to pattern infoboxes, listing e.g. apgcode, Niemiec number/identifier, Pentadecathlon (Koenig) identifier, stamp collection indices (jslife, DRH), and so on.
    • Create Template:PatternIdentifiers and use it in pattern infobox templates.
    • Add jslife/DRH/... stamp collection indices etc., in an appropriate manner.
    • Add identifiers to articles.
      • DONE: 112P51.
      • DONE: apgcode=.
      • NOT DONE: everything else.
  • (This is being discussed at the LifeWiki:Tiki bar.) Figure out how to best use LV:Viewer in articles in a way that's both useful, accessible, and well-integrated into the existing article layout.
  • Create missing articles for Life Lexicon entries, or redirect to existing ones (as appropriate). See below for a list.
  • Go through pages for common objects.
    • Also make a {{CiteFlammenkampCensus}} citation template. Unnecessary, Template:citeAchim already exists
    • Move statements about how common they are to a new section, and note that the data is from Achim Flammenkamp's census.
    • Add data on common-ness from Catagolue.
    • If possible, find a copy of the results from Nathaniel's census and add data from that as well. (This is referenced on a few pages anyway. Check archive.org, or ask on the conwaylife.com forums.)
      • Discussion thread for this census: [5]
      • The last copy on archive.org dates from May 10, 2011, and lists 154 still lifes and oscillators, plus 4 spaceships. Images are broken, but the RLE encoded in the URLs can be used to identify (unnamed) patterns.
      • Unnamed patterns on this page are at User:Apple Bottom/Nathaniel's census (names via Catagolue).
      • Nathaniel himself may have a more recent and/or complete results. (He doesn't; data was lost in a server crash.)
      • Add data on commonness from Nathaniel's census.
    • There's also a census by Andrzej Okrasinski. Mentioned here. - DONE, thanks User:Lewis!
      • Last archive.org copy: 2009-10-27, [6]; PDF of results [7]
    • Were there any other censuses/soup-search efforts?

Next/Later

  • Write articles for common patterns from Catagolue.
  • Where appropriate, move references out of main article text for further readability/editability.
    • See [8] for an example.
  • Citation templates:
    • Make a {{CiteLifeLine}} template that can be used to cite LifeLine issues easily without resorting to {{cite web}}. - already exists.
    • Use Template:CiteLifeline where Lifeline is currently cited directly.
    • Make Template:CiteForumPost. Use Template:LinkForumThread, with format=ref.
      • Use it wherever Template:Cite web is currently used to cite forum posts.
      • Also use it where forum posts are referenced without a citation template.
    • Make a list of citation templates, transclude it in their documentation. Better yet, use DPL to generate it automatically.
  • Most population 12 still lifes have no entries.
    • Given how many there are, consider discussing up to which size still lives should have entries at all.
  • Transcribe further LifeLine issues.
    • Modulo community consensus, update existing transcriptions to use LifeViewer and on-wiki RLE snippets instead of static images.
    • Also see Lifeline/project.
  • Add entries for various "well-known" (i.e. well-investigated) rules, especially named ones.
  • Write articles for "Pattern of the Year" nominations (see ConwayLife.com forums). Any pattern thus nominated is clearly important.
  • (Perhaps) write articles for all patterns in the various "stamp collections" floating around, notably jslife and Dean Hickerson's stamp collections.
  • Make sure all oscillators/spaceships have animated images, and create/upload missing ones.
  • Add rule parameters to spaceship pages.
  • Double-check oscillators starting with $, 0-9, A, B to make sure rulemin is correct.
  • Add rulespecial= parameters to oscillators, still lifes and spaceships where appropriate.
  • Add an "in other rules" section to pattern articles.
  • Make Template:CrawlerNavbox and use it on the crawler-related categories/templates instead of the generic PatternMainNavbox.
  • Add a symmetry option to Template:Pattern (and related templates) and display the pattern's symmetry in the infobox, and also put patterns into the right symmetry category automatically.
    • This should be discussed at the Tiki bar first.

Stalled

  • Check oscillator pages and ensure the infoboxes have rulemin and rulemax parameters.

Done

  • Use DPL to automatically populate the list of link templates.
  • Add rule parameters to still lifes. - DONE
    • Oscillizer also works for these, since they're really p1 oscillators.
    • Snippet: |rulespecial=[[Conway's Game of Life|Conway Life]]|rulemin=B/S23|rulemax=B/S012345678. Fill in B conditions for rulemax. Note: rulemin may also be B/S2 or B/S3.
  • Use {{CiteLexicon}} where appropriate.
    • Grep an XML dump of the current revisions to find what needs updating.
  • Make images for Symmetry illustrating the various kinds of symmetry, à la Alexey Nigin in the linked thread.
  • Format infobox transclusions on pattern pages for readability/editability.
    • See [9] for an example.
    • Make a local helper script to handle this.
    • Category:Patterns: $, 1-9, A-Z - DONE
  • The RLE/Plaintext/Life 1.05/Life 1.06 files for Killer candlefrobras are wrong, encoding the "Killer candlefrobras eating an HWSS" reaction instead of the pattern itself.

Needs admin assistance

General ideas for LifeWiki

  • Would be nice to have better integration of RLE. Perhaps an extension to handle it, either in its own namespace (RLE:) or as parser tags (<rle>). Images could also be auto-generated from RLE then. Extension:EasyTimeline might serve as a base.
  • LifeViewer integration would also be nice, ideally tied into the above. See [10], [11].
  • Information on patterns etc. could additionally be encoded in a semantic format to facilitate automated processing. See [12]. Alternatively, would a Wikidata-like repo of facts be useful?
    • This could be done in Template:Pattern etc., and would be transparent to human users; articles would still render as before, and their source text wouldn't need to be changed.
    • What would be the best solution for this? Generating machine-readable data in some XML- or JSON-based microformat, Semantic Mediawiki, or a Wikidata-like repository?
  • Would be nice to handle other rules in some way.
    • How would articles be named? Prefixes/namespaces (e.g. HighLife:Bomber or B36/S23:Bomber)? Suffixes (e.g. Bomber (HighLife) or Bomber (B36/S23))? What about patterns that work in several important rules, such as the Moon (which is in both Seeds and Live Free or Die, not to mention various other B2 rules)?
    • How would pattern categories work? Different category trees for each rule?
    • Might be better to keep wikis for different rules separate (though they could share the same MediaWiki codebase, the way that the Wikimedia Foundation runs many different wikis). But this would lead to duplication of effort for templates etc. Would a central template repository be useful? (What if different wikis want to tweak the same template in different ways? The repo could act as a shadow repo only providing templates not present locally, but this would still mean templates would likely diverge instead of being edited globally.)
  • MediaWiki supports Lua scripting. Would be good to have, to replace the more complicated templates and to do things difficult to do with templates at all.
  • Combatting spam:
    • MediaWiki has various rate-limiting features etc. to combat spam. These could perhaps be used to do away with the "you manually have to request the trusted flag to edit" bit.
    • Alternatively, or in addition, it's possible to limit editing to auto-confirmed users.
    • There's also stable versions and patrolling.

Misc.

Algorithm • Allan Wechsler

Done, sort of. Algorithm currently redirects to search program (which could probably be expanded with info about the types of algorithms typically used in CA research) and Allan Wechsler is a bit on the shorter side. Ian07 (talk) 00:26, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Catagolue

Note: A complete list of named objects can now be found on Gitlab.

Objects seen and named in APG's Catagolue that do not have LifeWiki articles (incomplete; also note that names with underscores, question marks or square brackets in them are excluded):

(Content moved to User:AwesoMan3000/Catagolue objects needing pages)

Life Lexicon

See User:Apple Bottom/TODO/Life Lexicon.

Pentadecathlon dictionary

See [13].

Croaker • Flutter

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