thelieutenant said:
My main complaints about having qualifiers for characters that don't need them:
- Qualifiers should only be used if the character shares a name with a different character. Other than that, there are already systems in place to deal with precision tagging.
Playing whack-a-mole with old character tags whenever a new character tag makes them ambiguous is a much worse solution than future-proofing it so that such a task is unnecessary. It is far, far easier to simply add character qualifiers from the beginning than perform a song and dance on the forums for every new copyright over which characters should and shouldn't receive a qualifier (unless, of course, all or a majority of the characters have very unique names). This is especially true when more than half of the characters for a copyright need qualifiers while at the same time there are arguments that the rest of the characters do not.
- Useless qualifiers provide information that the copyright tag itself already provides. If you have no idea what copyright a character is from, click on nearly any image with that character tagged and the copyright will be there. If a copyright gets large enough that a character list wiki page is needed, then make one.
What you refer to as "useless" qualifiers do not actually cause any real problems. They do, however, offer consistency with the rest of a series' character tags. I have seen the argument in this thread that something like cryogunner_legionnaire_(genshin_impact) is more annoying to type out, but this reasoning falls flat even for the example that was given - typing "cryog" almost immediately brings up cryogunner_legionnaire_(genshin_impact) in the autocomplete.
Additionally, when only half or less of the characters from a copyright are unqualified, it can give the appearance that they do not actually belong to said copyright because of the lack of consistency in the taglist with all the other qualified character tags. Eliminating this potential confusion for those unfamiliar with a series is, in my opinion, a valid reason to support qualifiers.
- This is bad standard going forward. This would mean every character from here on out, regardless how unique their name is, would need qualifiers. And if you want to keep this consistent, every character on the history of danbooru would need a qualifier. I do not look forward to updating hundreds of thousands of images so all the characters on this site have a qualifier. We sometimes have this idea that something being more precise automatically makes it better. But when there was the discussion of Touhou -> Touhou_Project, its official name, it was shot down, because everyone can understand that Touhou is Touhou Project. Precision should not trump the common usage.
I don't think anyone arguing in favor of qualifiers would agree with this; it is a rather sweeping statement that is both unrealistic and a bad idea. If most of a copyright's character tags are unique enough then yes, there is little point in adding qualifiers as there is a very low chance that they will become ambiguous in the future. As for updating every existing unqualified character tag on Danbooru, nobody is arguing for this. Besides the main reason of disambiguation, another key point of qualifiers is to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done in order to achieve said disambiguation - if a series already has qualified characters, then there is no work to do when a new character with an identical name pops up elsewhere. It would be contradictory to that goal to embark on some massive, months-long quest to qualify every single existing character tag to avoid the extra keystrokes required if some new copyright is crazy enough to create their own character called "Remilia Scarlet".
As a side note, the touhou -> touhou_project alias proposal was not about being more "precise" but rather about being more "correct", as technically the copyright's full name is "Touhou Project". It was rejected mainly because it was such a massive and engrained tag that A) other areas of Danbooru (and other boorus entirely) would have required serious cleanup in the wake of the alias, and B) most people didn't like the idea of changing a 16-year-old tag, one of the oldest and largest copyright tags on the site, just to be "technically correct". If the series wasn't the titan that it is today, I would not have been surprised if that alias had been approved.
- Qualifiers in recent years became prevalent with the wave of gachas, where the characters have multiple forms like in FGO or are named after real things like Kancolle, Azur, and GF. In these cases, qualifiers were needed to distinguish the ship from the shipgirl or whatever Fate is doing. Extending qualifiers to characters with unambiguous names does not make sense. Blindly following what the current popular tags are doing is not a valid strategy for tagging.
Again, this is not why people are in favor of qualifiers. Nobody is arguing for this, especially not for Fate. At this point, it is a universally accepted truth that Fate tags are an ungodly mess and should not be looked to for guidance in any regard whatsoever, lest you bring the thunderous wrath of albert down upon thine head.
- These qualifiers are useless precision for characters that have no ambiguity about their name. Adding _(copyrightname) to a character makes it more precise sure, but unless the character is ambiguous, no one says this. If I want to talk about Ayanami from that one shipgirl gacha, I need to specify Azur or Kancolle. If I want to talk about Koakuma, that shouldn't need a qualifier. If I want to talk about Edward Elric, that shouldn't need a qualifier. No matter how obscure the copyright is, if the name is unique, there should not be a qualifier.
Qualifiers should not be used because of a copyright's obscurity. They should be used because of a character tag's potential or actual ambiguity, or to provide consistency. Edward Elric might not need a qualifier, but if he were just Edward then he certainly would. Similarly, if we have only a single post from a copyright containing a character called "Edward von Farsightedness III", the fact that there is only a single post from that copyright has no bearing on if its characters need qualifiers. "Edward von Farsightedness III" is incredibly unique and as such would not need a qualifier.
- Adding qualifiers to unambiguous names is a bad solution to a problem that was solved years ago. We have a solution, the wiki. Yes, there are times where people don't read the wiki. And some characters don't have wikis at all. And that's why the Wiki Request Thread (topic #12858) exists. Most of the time, if the character just has a single sentence in their wiki page about their copyright is enough. If all else fails and no one on this site knows who this character is, just google the character name and the copyright there will be a Fandom wiki page that someone worked on years ago that we can just use.
Yes, there are times where people don't read the wiki.
I don't think you understand just how prevalent this problem actually is. Compared to the entire userbase, it's really only active contributors who read/write wikis (and even then not all of them actually do) - I would be surprised if even half of the users who only use Danbooru to browse/favorite posts even know of the wiki's existence. It is much easier for the average user's accessibility to have the copyright's name attached directly to the character tag rather than to have them to go to the character's wiki to figure out where they're from.
- This one is personal, but these extended tags look awful on the sidebar. The + - buttons usually push the qualified name onto a second line, and make the tag list "longer". This one is a minor point though.
I would argue it actually looks worse, especially in the taglist when only half or less of a copyright's characters are unqualified. You end up with qualifiers randomly peppered in there and it just looks messy. At that point we might as well just qualify them all.
- IF on the off chance that one day in the future a character from a different copyright shares the same name as these characters, then just update the tag. We aren't dealing with the second law of thermodynamics here, we can change the tag at a later date. It is not as if once these characters get stripped of their qualifier now they can never have it again.
For the same reasons, why strip them in the first place? It is unnecessary when they're not causing any real harm, and if an actually compelling reason comes up that requires their removal then as you mentioned, we can change the tag at a later date.
tl;dr: qualifiers are not the devil and do not actually hinder anyone's use of the site (except maybe those using Fumimi in Danbooru's Discord server). They provide consistency within copyrights and lessen the current and future workload on the forums as less BURs will need to be submitted and anyone approving said BURs does not need to comb through them to double-check if all the characters listed should or shouldn't be being qualified.
