BrokenEagle98 said:
I already commented in the previous topic mentioned in the OP (topic #14804), but I'll expand even further why the two terms are not interchangeable, as is very often the case with the English language.
The original tags, source larger and source smaller, are shorthand for the English sentences, "the source is larger" and "the source is smaller". This is understood and picked up on because they are not complete sentence structures, but close enough to one so that the brain naturally fills in the missing pieces. Not only that, but the source is the subject and focus of that sentence, which gives emphasis on the grouping of the terms. Additionally, the post is the understood object on the sentence, e.g. "the source (where the post came from) is larger", and as the object of the sentence it has lesser emphasis.
Conversely, the proposed tags of larger source and smaller source are not shorthand for any complete English sentence, at least not readily apparent. They do form a complete unit though, but only as that of an object, so the brain does no further processing as there is nothing to complete. However, as I mentioned before, although the sentence for these terms are not readily apparent, they in fact form one where the post is the subject of the sentence, e.g. "the post has a larger source". As the subject of the sentence, the post is given greater emphasis, whereas the source as the object has much lesser emphasis.
I seriously don't understand how any of this matters. It's all completely arbitrary. Clearly the current word order isn't universally understood and picked up on as shorthand for a completely arbitrary sentence, or this discussion wouldn't be happening. The first thing that happened when these two tags were first brought up in the forums was someone suggesting they should be reversed. The brain does not "fill in the missing pieces" because literally any grouping of words could be added to them to form sentences. Which, unless I'm misunderstanding 99% of the tags on this site, they're not supposed to be shorthand for sentences, they're supposed to be brief, concise, easily understood descriptors of the image or something related to the image, such as their source. If I have to guess what sentence a two or three word tag someone else created is supposed to be short for, that sounds like the tag was named improperly.
Why in the world does "emphasis" matter? The point is to describe the source of the image, it makes absolutely no difference whether the source or the image is being "emphasized." Whether you're describing it as, "This post has a larger source than itself" or "The source of this post is larger than the post," it means the exact. Same. Thing: The size of the image being hosted on Danbooru does not match the size of the source image it came from, for some reason or another. It does not matter for what the tag is intended for whether the source is the object or subject, especially regarding the fact that tags should be understandable by themselves without needing to be transposed into a sentence.
Lastly, can you verify that your preferred sentence is the more easily understood of the two proposed sentences? Which I will reiterate neither of which should even be necessary to be aware of to understand what these tags are for, additional context for a tag and how to use it is what the wiki is for, you should not need to formulate a sentence with the tag's name to make sense of it. Unless you poll the entire user base of the site, I don't think you can so casually make that claim. I certainly didn't immediately understand it, the creator of this topic certainly didn't immediately understand it when they first questioned the word order in topic #14804, and the fact they made this alias request suggests to me they weren't convinced by your arguments in that thread either.
The reason to place more emphasis on the source is that the item being talked about is external to the image, external to the page, and external to the site. The post itself is only corollary, as the item of focus needs to be the external sites where the images come from. Contrast that to the *_source tags, where the focus is usually on that of the image/post itself or on actions related to them.
This paragraph practically defeats itself, and in fact the entire post. In the list of tags you've linked, check pixiv source, check source, and source request are more appropriately understood to be in separate tag groups from the rest; the former two part of the check_* group and the latter third part of the *_request group. The remaining five tags are all examples of the exact thing you insist doesn't work. They are all [descriptor]_[noun]. No one seems to be saying those tags need to be reversed because they're difficult to understand or confusing. Every single one of them could be made into sentences that say, "This post has a[n] [descriptor] source." The exact sentence you say would be harder for people to grasp. They are evidence, that you provided, against your own claims. Why is it not source bad? Why is it not source archived?
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TL;DR I like the way the original sounds better, which is why I am voting against the proposal.
And then there's this. If there was any chance I might have been swayed by your argument, this completely discredited the entire post. You literally condensed your entire argument down to "I don't want to change it cause I like it this way." Completely removing any sense of genuine justification from anything you said prior to this final line. As if all of the arguments in your post didn't already defeat themselves, you rendered your own defense as flimsy as a simple case of bias. Which I realize after looking around makes perfect sense, because you created the tags. According to danbooru's history, without any prior discussion, only a month ago, and in fact around the same time they were first brought up in topic #14804.
This means either the creation and naming of the tags were decided offsite, Discord probably, which is perfectly fair, or you just created them on your own with no additional input, possibly having them agreed upon afterwards. But, regardless of how the tags came to be, despite the fact four people besides yourself immediately downvoted this alias request, only two people in the last month have made any effort to actually defend them: yourself, and nonamethanks, whose sole contribution to the discussion is that the tags are named this way for consistency. This is actually a reason I could accept, though I may not like it, if these two tags matched any other tags in any logical way, which they don't. They're effectively only a group of each other, no other source tags actually match them, and I've already explained why source request doesn't count.
So, no one else seems to have any sort of defense, or, despite disagreeing with the name change, aren't interested enough to provide one, which is perfectly understandable, they didn't make the tags. The only one actually making the effort to keep these tags as they are is the creator, you, who has already admitted the entire debate is steeped in bias. You haven't even made a real attempt to answer any of my questions, you've done nothing but provide what, from my perspective, appear to be completely unverifiable claims. Not only that, but in topic #14804 your only response to my argument against you was to rudely dismiss me because I foolishly made the mistake of mentioning being a native speaker, instead of providing any sort of productive response to a genuine critique of the justifications you provided. Can you not back them up? How would these tags be confused with the other source tags like you said? They serve the exact same purpose as the others, what is there to be confused about? What would be the result of the confusion? Are people going to misuse them somehow? Nothing you've said here or in the other thread answers any of my questions to any logical degree as far as the policies, intentions, and naming of tags on this site are concerned in relation to these two tags you've created.