About the "tan" tag.

As it stands, minus a tanline, is there any discernable difference between the "dark skin" and "tan" tags?

The wiki currently defines "tan" as "Skin darkened due to exposure to the sun." Typically, a tan is discernable by the presence of tanlines. Minus any visible tanlines, there doesn't seem to be any distinguishable difference between "tan" and "dark skin," as a tan without tanlines would just be "skin that is darker in tone than the usual Caucasian/East Asian skintone."

Currently...

post #2409537
post #3588629
post #3548557
post #2917771
post #2802582 *

...meet the definition of "dark skin," but can not be identifiably tanned from sun exposure, and therefore do not fit the definition of "tan."

*(oh hey! post #2802583 ...no tanlines!)

And therefore share the same tag as:

post #3534348
post #2943290
post #2904292
post #3094960
post #2659310

Should the definition of "tan" just be changed to... skin that happens to be tan in color, and perhaps redefine the "dark skin" tag to be skin that is darker than tan? I know that can be subjective, but as it stands I feel like "dark skin" is incredibly vague, and basically seems to be used for any character that doesn't have a pale complexion.

There's many issues in trying to make the two tags stick to certain definitions: mainly, both tanlines and dark skin are very mainstream tags in all the other boorus and other many big anime-centered sites like exhentai and variants, and they're also fairly subjective tags, because it's often hard to tell which is which without having meta knowledge of the copyright. That means people will use them arbitrarily most of the time, and no amount of wiki rewrite will change that. Short of nuking or merging them (which would be a horrible idea) I doubt there's any way to truly solve the issue.

For what's worth very dark skin and tanline are the actual "objective" versions of those two tags.

nonamethanks said:

There's many issues in trying to make the two tags stick to certain definitions: mainly, both tanlines and dark skin are very mainstream tags in all the other boorus and other many big anime-centered sites like exhentai and variants, and they're also fairly subjective tags, because it's often hard to tell which is which without having meta knowledge of the copyright. That means people will use them arbitrarily most of the time, and no amount of wiki rewrite will change that. Short of nuking or merging them (which would be a horrible idea) I doubt there's any way to truly solve the issue.

For what's worth very dark skin and tanline are the actual "objective" versions of those two tags.

Solid points all around! Those two tags are a bit tricky, but I do keep on forgetting that the very dark skin tag exists. I feel like that would definitely help in differentiating the top row from the bottom at the very least, although unfortunately the post count alone shows that the tag is being heavily underutilized. Thank you for the input!