Seeing others' perspectives on this has made the situation clearer for me. I'm seeing a difference in perspective on what the basic role of the tag is. I'm taking a minimal perspective while others are noting the ways that tags can offer more functionality. I think we should take a look at the implications (no pun intended). Here's my perspective on various roles:
Purpose of the character tag:
✅ contain the name of a character associated with an image
✅ facilitate retrieval of images
❌ contain the copyright associated with an image
Purpose of qualifiers in character tags:
✅ disambiguate character names in the event that a naming conflict exists
✅ prevent future naming conflicts in established situations such as direct namesakes, common names, and references to outside names
❌ leverage the edit box for quick copyright lookup
❌ bypass usage of other site resources such as the tag lookup system and the wiki
It's worth noting that double-word names which don't contain qualifiers also don't directly express copyright information, so the idea of taking this shortcut to find out about a copyright is inherently inconsistent.
Purpose of the copyright tag:
✅ contain the copyright associated with an image
✅ facilitate retrieval of images
I feel that the copyright tag is being overlooked in this discussion. It's here and it has a clear purpose.
I'm seeing two clear violations of separation of concerns here as well. The most glaring one really is an elephant in the room that should be looked at.
Instead of:
Character: ganyu
Copyright: genshin_impact
We have:
Character: ganyu_(genshin_impact)
Copyright: genshin_impact
This is bad. It's not only a 100% redundancy in the tags by way of ugly underscores and parentheses (which need to be escaped in some circumstances, and can be a pain for users to type), and a large amount of bloat, but also a complete copy of the information from the copyright namespace into the character namespace. From a database design perspective, we need to ask why this is necessary. I do think this should to be kept to the logical minimum.
It's also worth looking at why the copyright namespace is failing in its purpose for some of you. It's here to tell you what copyright a certain image is associated with, and from my perspective it works perfectly. For other people's user experience, if there are ways to make that association more clear through site functionality or changes in workflow, that would be a productive discussion. But again, why are we contaminating character tags with words that don't belong there?
The argument that overuse of qualifiers is the way forward, that it's consistent, and that we'd be making Genshin an exception by removing qualifiers also doesn't make sense to me. Yes, some more recent copyrights such as Xenoblade are following this convention, but that's kind of a circular argument isn't it? We'll do it because we already did it sometimes. We can apply the same outlook to Xenoblade as well. Many of its names would fall under the requirements for qualifiers, such as being common names like "Rex", and others look unique such as morag_ladair_(xenoblade). Also, we notably _didn't_ do it at other times. Neither of these cases provides an objective reason to do it or not to. That was the point I made earlier about people seemingly adopting this convention by osmosis because Fate is popular and also super complicated. Also, why are video games so much more implicated in this situation and not anime?
It's getting into an annoying lack of consistency, which I don't think will help solve problems in the future. Two-word names have fewer qualifiers (so why does morag have one?), while one-word names are more susceptible to conflicts, thus more commonly take on qualifiers. Sure, but what about names that have little to no chance of being conflicted?
Why are there still so many single-word names that lack qualifiers and it's no problem? Could it be because people want to implicate character tags as a copyright lookup for new and popular franchises? This isn't a change in the purpose of tags, but in user behaviour.
That's the second big issue with separation of concerns: Tags shouldn't be used as shortcuts in this way. Also, it's a logical fallacy to say that you can find out the copyright of a character through that character's tag while people are discussing the character on the forum. The number of words in a character's name has no bearing on this. I would have to look up Morag Ladair as much as Ganyu if I weren't familiar with said character.
So again, this is conflating different roles, and it's implicating tags in a purpose that's not meant for them. A character's name is NOT a lookup keyword for its copyright. A character's name is independent of the character's copyright, and it's poor practice to conflate the two.
Don't get me wrong, all the users appreciate the work that you're doing, and it's natural to want to find efficiencies in one's workflow, but I don't think we should encroach on the basic purpose of tags and contaminate a namespace with unnecessary bloat because it makes the job easier and quicker for some. The everyday user experience and the quality of the database are important too.
