Short Hair and Boys

I was just noticing that for some old reason the tag short hair and very short hair is not meant to be tagged on male characters.
topic #2799
topic #13365

After reading those two topic I still only know that the reason to exclude males is, that if you want to search for short_hair, you want girls with short hair in your results (because it was like that in the past?). But I think that this rule is pretty much outdated, given the time that has passed by now and the arguments given in the specific topics about it. I don´t think it´s really necessary to exclude males, given some reasons:

It´s not really user friendly anymore. Even if we joke about it, that most users come here to see alot of cute anime girls, I don´t think that most of those users are really searching for short hair as a tag "alone". I guess they can search for, for exampel: bob_cut or tomboy, or any other way to get short hair like that. On the other hand it also destroys the possibility to search for 1boy alone with short hair. Last year ago I was searching for boys with short hair for private reasons and now I get, why I wasn´t able to get some good results out of it. It´s on any way hard to search for specific copyrights (with only 2-tag-search) and short hair, if you want some boys from them. Searching for fate_(series) and short hair will by now only get you a big amount of saber, jeanne, gudako and alot of mistagged hair_lenghts. The possibility to search for some boys with short hair is kinda zero. You would have to search for the specific character, but if you don´t know the name of him, it´s even harder to find stuff, because it´s a swamp of all those same characters repeating themselves over and over again, and the amount of original boys with no copyright is rising.
It´s also no argument to say, that boys are not upped that much, because then, it wouldn´t be a problem to tag them, because if I really want to search for cute girls with short hair, those few boys are not in the way. And I don´t think that member level users with restricted search are saying: "Man, boys have short hair too, thats a very shitty imageboard"

Another thing: topic #17086
We can´t tell anybody to "tag what you see", if this isn´t even correct. New users and when I started upping I was like that, looked at an image and assumed: I see short hair, I tag it. We can´t even assume that everybody is reading the wiki, even if we want it that way. It´s even bold to assume that everybody reads howto:tag, and given that specific wiki under general tags: No exclusion of male hair_lenghts

Character's features: hair length, hair color, hair style, decorations on head (hat, hair_ornament, hair_ribbon, etc), eyes color, and recognizable special attributes.

Goin on: Gettin the argument "you can search for it by excluding medium_hair and long_hair" I would have to assume, that every image is correctly tagged and as I know that this isn´t the case, you can just try searching for any specific character I didn´t clean and try "[character] -short_hair -medium_hair -long_hair -head_out_of_frame -very_long_hair" and try to figure for how many cases it´s not possible to take this method. (for example: hakurei_reimu -short_Hair -long_hair -medium_hair -head_out_of_frame: 25024 posts, where the hair_length is maybe not tagged correctly) You also can´t exclude it, if you want to have "party" image with more male_characters in it, because those results would be excluded.

Another one:
I won´t be able to search for boys with a specific shorter hair_lenght that, we all now, is given to. I don´t think, for exampel, that Gilgamesh has the same hair_lenght in most images than other male characters (post #3992220 against post #3773761 ; or, not fate: post #3997422) I wouldn´t be able to get those, because I cant search for very_short_hair, what is prohibited too. But you have to admit, that there is way more to go, between bald and medium_hair/shoulder_hair. Short hair isn´t exactly short hair.

And personally my last point is, that you don´t every copyright character and sometimes you have to search for them as a new user. It´s already hard enough to search for some (new) females, given that people tend to tag stuff as grey hair when it´s silver, white when it´s silver or whatever. If I wanted to search for, for example "Alexander" from Fate and I don´t know the name, I would go onto danbooru and try to search for him, for exampel with short_hair+red_hair+fate or 1boy+short_hair+fate. But I won´t get any usefull result of it, even if it´s sometimes really useful to do those kind of searches.

So, what I think make things easier:
1. Tag every person as we tell it all the time: "Tag what you see" and change the Wiki
2. Make specific hair_lenght tags for every sex (which is ugly): short_hair_boy, medium_hair_boy, short_hair_girl etc etc.
3. Let it stay like that and nuke "1boy solo -1girl" every few years, because people won´t stop tagging short_hair on 1boy solo images and following tag gardening, because those images aren´t always solo.

tl;dr:
1. searching for 1boy short_hair is only possible if you´re ok to search for 1girl or multiple girls at the same time too
2. searching for 1boy -medium_hair -long_hair would mean that anybody is really adding the hair_lenght to their image and you won´t get any long_haired or medium_haired boys
3. you wont be really able to search for a character you don´t know
If I´m not to a specific copyright and don´t know the protagonist of "Kaguya-sama love is war" I would search for 1boy blonde_hair or 1boy short_hair to get him, but option 2 wouldn´t work here
4. It makes things way to complex
5. It´s more user friendly, bein able to search for 1boy and short_hair with only 2 possible tags to search / or male_focus short_hair

Maybe I forgot some arguments while I was at it, but I guess you can get my point. What are other opinions on this specific topic, as it´s pretty old right now?

I think it's better if we keep it as it is now. We don't have any way of expressing when two tags correspond to the same character on any image with multiple characters present. On the flip-side, when there's only one character present there's no need for it. male_focus -medium_hair -long_hair -very_long_hair or some such combination should work just fine given proper tagging. I know you've already mentioned that our tagging accuracy isn't high enough to suit your needs, but I'd say the real solution to that is to fix the tagging on posts that need fixing.

If you really want tags for men's hairstyles, then you'd have no choice but to go with option 2. Option 1 is a bad choice because the lengths is different for men's hairstyles to women's hairstyles and what would qualify as short and medium length male hairstyles would all fall under the categorization of very_short_hair (as defined by women's hairstyles). If you want proper differentiation between the depictions of men's hair style lengths you'd really have no choice but to create a separate set of tags just for men's hair.

Naming would sound more natural following an ordering like men's_short_hair or boy's_short_hair.

I also think it's better to keep it as it is.

I disagree on the status quo, it makes no sense to not be able to tag post #3872872 as very short hair just because the character is male.

Also, very short hair implies short hair, defying the wiki definition that it shouldn't be tagged on all male characters, since very short hair applies to only feminine characters (for some reason?). Even if it did apply to any male character at all it would still break the constraints as it'd pull short hair via implication.

Also, short_hair ~1boy ~multiple_boys -1girl -multiple_girls -otoko_no_ko has 13k results so everyone's already ignoring it.

nonamethanks said:

short_hair ~1boy ~multiple_boys -1girl -multiple_girls -otoko_no_ko has 13k results so everyone's already ignoring it.

13k posts means that every single person is ignoring it? Of course not. Try to be more precise. Anyway, I agree with Renim's comment.

Zurreak said:

13k posts means that every single person is ignoring it? Of course not. Try to be more precise. Anyway, I agree with Renim's comment.

Ok, how about this:

via API I count 1058 unique uploaders under the search I linked. Even considering a half or more of those posts as having the tag added by someone else (ludicrous amount), it's still hundreds of people ignoring that footnote in the wiki (312 in the last 2 years).

Zurreak said:

13k posts means that every single person is ignoring it?

nonamethanks said:

...it's still hundreds of people ignoring that footnote in the wiki.

I was unaware that short_hair was not supposed to be used on male characters until this topic because I assumed short_hair meant "short hair", not "short hair except if it's on a boy" - it's not ignorance if there's a very unintuitive caveat in the guidelines for a tag's usage. Hair is hair; it makes little sense to have one of the taggable lengths exclusive to females just because it's considered normal for the other sex. An argument could be made that tagging short_hair on boys drowns out search results for short_hair on girls, but the exact same argument could be made as to why we shouldn't tag long_hair on girls. In fact, it would be a much more effective argument the other way around as there are nearly 8 times as many posts featuring long_hair and girls than posts featuring long_hair and boys.

This arbitrary rule seems to stem from an assumption that a majority of users prefer to search for female characters. Even if that is true, the impact of tagging short_hair on male characters is negligible when you consider the fact that there are five times as many posts featuring girls than boys. I think this is a rather asinine tagging practise that should be reworked as soon as possible.

AngryZapdos said: In fact, it would be a much more effective argument the other way around as there are nearly 8 times as many posts featuring long_hair and girls than posts featuring long_hair and boys.

This is true, it's like saying long hair doesn't apply on girls because most of them have long hair.

NWF_Renim said:

If you really want tags for men's hairstyles, then you'd have no choice but to go with option 2. Option 1 is a bad choice because the lengths is different for men's hairstyles from women's hairstyles and what would qualify as short and medium length male hairstyles would all fall the categorization of very_short_hair (as defined by women's hairstyles). If you want proper differentiation between the depictions of men's hair style lengths you'd really have no choice but to create a separate set of tags just for men's hair.

Naming would sound more natural following an ordering like men's_short_hair or boy's_short_hair.

I'm with NWF Renim on this one. Conflating the usage will make it more difficult to find/filter short haired girls in cases where both males and females are present, since they'll get swamped with the majority cases (almost all guys are depicted with short hair). I'm not against creating new tags to fit this though. I feel the intended use cases and often the visual appearance are different enough to justify separate tags.

AngryZapdos said:

Hair is hair; it makes little sense to have one of the taggable lengths exclusive to females just because it's considered normal for the other sex.

+1 to everything said here

Shinjidude said:

Conflating the usage will make it more difficult to find/filter short haired girls in cases where both males and females are present, since they'll get swamped with the majority cases (almost all guys are depicted with short hair)

But that's already a problem with trying to search for long haired males because of how common it is for girls to have long hair. Why is that fine but the reverse isn't? You would need a full set of gender specific hair length tags to even this out, not just one or two.

I would support making male-specific tags for short hair (like short-haired_male) but not use the normal short hair for it, as Renim has pointed out.

nnt, thank you for clarifying that it’s only some people, not everyone. The fact that some people were ignoring/unaware of it was already established as of Guaro’s original post. That’s a problem we’ll have to keep in mind.

AngryZapdos said:

I think this is a rather asinine tagging practise that should be reworked as soon as possible.

Okay, but you still haven’t stated which of the solutions posed by Guaro you favor and why. Do you have an objection to the solution supported by Renim, Shinjidude, Unbreakable, and myself? If so, why?

nonamethanks said:

This is true, it's like saying long hair doesn't apply on girls because most of them have long hair.

No it isn’t and you ought to know better.
Girls’ ratio of not long hair (1girl solo ~short_hair ~medium_hair ~very_long_hair) to long hair (1girl solo long_hair -very_long_hair):
1 to 1.104
Boys’ ratio of not short hair (1boy solo ~long_hair ~medium_hair) to short hair (1boy solo -long_hair -medium_hair):
1 to 4.678

Zurreak said:

Girls’ ratio of not long hair (1girl solo ~short_hair ~medium_hair ~very_long_hair) to long hair (1girl solo long_hair -very_long_hair):
1 to 1.104

It's pointless to try and measure this because you'll notice that 1girl solo short_hair and 1girl solo medium_hair overlap a lot (even the same characters), as different people have different thresholds. There's even a lot of overlap for medium and long hair, so counting them into short_hair skews the ratios, it makes no sense to compare them like that.

thank you for clarifying that it’s only some people, not everyone.

It's about half the uploaders, from a quick look at the api. There were around 700 uploaders for the search I linked in my previous post in the last 2 years, and of them 300+ uploaders had the "wrong" tagging. Good luck gardening that.

you still haven’t stated which of the solutions posed by Guaro you favor and why

I'm in support of "tag what you see". Any other solution is useless, people will keep ignoring any guideline as long as the tag has such a general name as "short hair", and it's not viable to garden it because of the amount of people making the mistake.

nonamethanks said:

It's pointless to try and measure this because you'll notice that 1girl solo short_hair and 1girl solo medium_hair overlap a lot (even the same characters), as different people have different thresholds. There's even a lot of overlap for medium and long hair.

Okay, there's overlap. The point of yours that I was responding to still doesn't stand.

nonamethanks said:

Any other solution is useless, people will keep ignoring any guideline as long as the tag has such a general name as "short hair", and it's not viable to garden it because of the amount of people making the mistake.

So uploaders won't see the new tags at all? Because as soon as they see "boys'_short_hair" for the first time they'll know exactly what that means and most that do will change their tagging habits.

Zurreak said:

Okay, but you still haven’t stated which of the solutions posed by Guaro you favor and why.

I figured when I stated how silly it is to use gender as an argument for tagging hair length that it would be obvious I'm in favor of the only proposal Guaro made that doesn't involve using gender as an argument for tagging hair length. However, that apparently isn't the case so for the record, I support using any hair length tag on any character regardless of gender over making such exceptions, especially if we only add tag qualifiers for one gender.

Zurreak said:

No it isn’t and you ought to know better.
Girls’ ratio of not long hair (1girl solo ~short_hair ~medium_hair ~very_long_hair) to long hair (1girl solo long_hair -very_long_hair):
1 to 1.104
Boys’ ratio of not short hair (1boy solo ~long_hair ~medium_hair) to short hair (1boy solo -long_hair -medium_hair):
1 to 4.678

Ratio of posts featuring both boys and girls to posts featuring only boys or only girls:
1 to 7.4725

Ratio of posts featuring boys with short hair (1boy solo -medium_hair -long_hair) to girls with short hair (1girl solo short_hair):
1 to 5.5618

Ratio of posts featuring boys (~1boy ~multiple_boys -1girl -multiple_girls) to posts featuring girls (~1girl ~multiple_girls -1boy -multiple_boys):
1 to 14.1764

You should be taking your ratios into context - the real argument being discussed here was whether it would drown out search results, which simply isn't true. A majority of posts on the site only feature one of the two genders, so a minority of posts are even affected in the first place. Additionally, the argument "it makes it harder to search for girls with short hair" is blatantly false when the amount of posts featuring girls with short hair outnumbers the amount featuring boys with short hair 5 to 1.

Almost every single thing on the site is easier to search for on female characters as a result of there being 14 posts featuring girls for every post featuring boys - we don't need this extra rule regarding hair length to support searches for girls when the results are already grossly in favor of them by default.

Okay, there's overlap. The point of yours that I was responding to still doesn't stand.

What point? That there's more posts of females with long hair than short hair? Unless we're gonna argue over semantics, long hair posts outnumber short hair and are in the millions, so yes, long hair is the default for female characters.

You should be taking your ratios into context - the real argument being discussed here was whether it would drown out search results, which simply isn't true. A majority of posts on the site only feature one of the two genders, so a minority of posts are even affected in the first place. Additionally, the argument "it makes it harder to search for girls with short hair" is blatantly false when the amount of posts featuring girls with short hair outnumbers the amount featuring boys with short hair 5 to 1.

Almost every single thing on the site is easier to search for on female characters as a result of there being 14 posts featuring girls for every post featuring boys - we don't need this extra rule regarding hair length to support searches for girls when the results are already grossly in favor of them by default.

Just to add to this:

1girl solo short_hair -> 523089

1boy solo -> 114114

Adding the short_hair tag to male characters will never drown female posts.

I'm in favor of using the same tags for both male and female characters. I myself currently tag hair length for boy characters, and to Renim's earlier point, I use the exact same standards for the male characters as I do for female characters, which is how it should be in my opinion.

This all boils down to tag simplicity versus tag accuracy, and I'd almost always prefer tagging to be simple than to be accurate. Sorting through false positives is fine with me, but making the work of tagging that much more difficult is just asking for posts to not be tagged.

While we're all tossing stones, I'd also like to see very short hair and very long hair unimplicated as well.

BrokenEagle98 said:

I'm in favor of using the same tags for both male and female characters. I myself currently tag hair length for boy characters, and to Renim's earlier point, I use the exact same standards for the male characters as I do for female characters, which is how it should be in my opinion.

This all boils down to tag simplicity versus tag accuracy, and I'd almost always prefer tagging to be simple than to be accurate. Sorting through false positives is fine with me, but making the work of tagging that much more difficult is just asking for posts to not be tagged.

I aggree, I have the sentiment that we currently have a tendency to over-complicate the tags, both in term of tag names and of exceptions to rules.
Plus, if we add hair length tag for each sex, we will need to either :

• go through virtually every post to retag them (except maybe for 1girl solo and 1boy solo) ;
• make some dangerous (and erroneous) assumption about the current quality of the tagging to automate this gardening, but even male_focus contains posts with girls (male_focus ~1girl ~multiple_girls has 1428 posts, and that's only if they are tagged).
• accept to let the older posts unmodified.

I don't think either is feasible nor diserable.

BrokenEagle98 said:
While we're all tossing stones, I'd also like to see very short hair and very long hair unimplicated as well.

I support this too, just how huge_breasts doesn't imply large_breasts. However, sorting very_long_hair from long_hair would need a lot of gardening too (very_long_hair -solo returns more than 117k posts).

Rignak said:

even male_focus contains posts with girls (male_focus ~1girl ~multiple_girls has 1428 posts, and that's only if they are tagged).

Just for the record, unless I'm misunderstanding you, male_focus is for posts where males are prominent, it's not for posts with only men, so (aside from a few mistags I see at a glance) most of the posts under the search you linked deserve the tag. Apologies if I misunderstood you.