Tagging and You

[Recel]

On the adding tags issue. I say it's ok how it is. You either make your own tags, and risk under tagging or tagging things wrong, and get reported (this is the part that really depends on the community) or you let others tag pictures for you, taking the risk of OTHERS tagging your picture wrong (again, depends on the community). Tagging can be, and will be abused no matter the system it works by. Because the flaw isn't in the tagging system.

Also, some better "education" on tagging could really help. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has no real idea how to tag a picture properly or right. And the "Tags and you" article only seemed to make me realise I tag even worse than I thought.

[Temrin]

@Recel
Most sites say to "tag what you see"
So like, in your icon for example you would put species, gender and perhaps other things like red_eyes, red_hair, the emotion/expression, that its an icon, characters name perhaps. Maybe even if it was a commission/gift/trade etc. could say spiky hair. furry, anthro, floppy_ears, looking_at_viewer, if you drew it then put your username, etc. : )

But yes, a full page (thats properly linked from the help/FAQ on the main site) with a bit more depth on how to tag would be great :3

[Michael_Ezaiany]

@Recel
Most sites say to "tag what you see"
So like, in your icon for example you would put species, gender and perhaps other things like red_eyes, red_hair, the emotion/expression, that its an icon, characters name perhaps. Maybe even if it was a commission/gift/trade etc. could say spiky hair. furry, anthro, floppy_ears, looking_at_viewer, if you drew it then put your username, etc. : )

I'm not sure commission/gift status are useful as tags in any way and so is username, seeing as we can put "user:<name>" in the search field to filter results to only from that user. I can see the need for it though, if you're posting someone else's work.

But from what I've seen elsewhere, it's a good practice to tag characters and original artists as some variation of "<name>(character)" and "<name>(artist)".

[Temrin]

Of course, i was just stating in general. With weasyl there are gives and takes to it, but for general use of tags, the rules of "tag what you see" is normally the way to go : )

[Hlavco]

I'm fine with anybody tagging anything, but reading the comments here, I think maybe viewer-submitted tags should appear in a different color or section on the page than the artist-submitted tags. That way, the artists who "don't want their art associated with" a certain subject will know that their viewers can see that somebody other than the artist gave their piece a certain tag. The piece can be efficiently searched, and the artist maintains their integrity or whatever you'd call it.

[Ketsuban]

I think it's worth my time to point out the "anyone can tag" scenario is not untested - Gelbooru and Danbooru have been doing it for years now. As such I can safely say people worrying about abuse are worrying about nothing - so long as people are proactive in fixing bad tagging the Wikipedia effect takes over and you end up with a rough consensus.

That said, Weasyl's tagging system could do with some improvements.

• There is no good reason to privilege artist tags over non-artist ones - artists are just as bad at tagging as everyone else. Tagging works if it's a community effort, and protecting artist tags just means nobody can clean up stupid nonsense like what happens on FA or what people have already brought up in this thread.
• Weasyl really needs some tools to analyse the tag cloud as a whole. I can't find out for a given tag how many pictures are tagged with it, and I can't search a list of tags, so I can't look for low-incidence tags - those are the ones which tend to be not well-chosen, duplicates of other tags (e.g. large_breasts vs big_breasts) or typos. Gelbooru and Danbooru aren't much better in this regard, but they're better than Weasyl.

e: Other booru features worth stealing are implications, aliases and tag categories. Implications are obvious - lucario and gardevoir both imply pokemon, renamon and agumon both imply digimon. Aliases solve the big_breasts/large_breasts dilemma by letting people tag with either and silently converting one to the other on submit. Tag categories mean certain tags have particular meaning - a tag for a particular character, for example, gets marked as a character tag.

[Lloxie]

Quick question- figured it was better to post it here rather than make a whole new thread for it. As far as tag filters go, can an asterisk be used for a catchall? For instance, would adding a filter for "hypno*" filter out everything with a tag that starts with "hypno" or would I have to make separate filters for "hypnosis", "hypnotize", etc.?

[Lloxie]

...anyone?

[Fiz]

Quick question- figured it was better to post it here rather than make a whole new thread for it. As far as tag filters go, can an asterisk be used for a catchall? For instance, would adding a filter for "hypno*" filter out everything with a tag that starts with "hypno" or would I have to make separate filters for "hypnosis", "hypnotize", etc.?

Sorry. No, it doesn't work that way.

[Lloxie]

Damn, that sucks. Ah well, thanks for the response! You might want to add something about that in the tagging help section/FAQ, by the way. ^^; As it is, it's very informative for uploaders but not very helpful to people on the other side of things, using them for searches and filters. For example, another question I had is: how do you search for multiple tags? (as in, submissions with ALL search terms, not just any of them?) Are AND/& searches currently supported, etc.?