Proposal: Removing unnecessary Genshin qualifiers

Vezral said:
If the concern is that danbooru won't come up when people google for "ganyu", then then there shouldn't even be a discussion. This BUR should just pass otherwise danbooru userbase would dry up.

That's not what I meant, I edited my post to be clearer.

Just imagine that a new series has just come out. Danbooru won't have been indexed for new results by google yet, so google will suggest the most searched result instead of the actual valid match first.

I'm not expressing my opinion on this BUR, just explaining why we always get weird missed searches for new series. It's a mix of new users who have no idea how the site works and bad search engines. Those likely are not going to decrease by a significant amount no matter what we do. Hell, right now the top missed search is "danboru".

Vezral said:

Those "arguments" that you put in "quotes" are the pros of doing so, not how we should deal with future cases.

I'm not the only one who thinks that it's important to consider how to accurately deal with future cases and that this discussion shouldn't happen without those considerations. There's nothing ridiculous about bringing that up.

Multiple people suggested that we should just add qualifiers from the very beginning, one reason being to avoid having a song and dance about which copyrights need qualifiers. Your hypothetical worldline also implies putting qualifiers on every character tag. Every? Are you seriously suggesting that? Why are you wanting to imagine Danbooru working this way, with _every_ character tag also having the copyright baked in? What is the actual need here?

We've been down that road: thelieutenant already showed that this is a bad standard going forward, and AngryZapdos, who is voting thumbs-down, already said that it's not correct to do a massive update on the site, but still wanted to maintain some consistency among copyrights. I still think the idea of setting the line halfway, or if the number of qualified characters begins to outnumber non-qualified (as AngryZapdos suggested) will require extra work in the future to go back and check. Don't use copyright as a standard to change character tags: There's no good or clear place to set the line.

I can't help but think that people are trying to use the wrong tools to solve a problem that still hasn't clearly been articulated. Don't forget that someone earlier was actually concerned about the Related Tags feature, and that got conflated with what the tags themselves are supposed to do. When you use the wrong tool to solve a problem, you almost always make a bigger problem.

Do people want more information about a tag on the fly through the autocomplete feature? You don't achieve that by smashing two different database fields into a conjoined 2-dimensional frankenfield. Don't use a hammer when you need a screwdriver.

And if the autocomplete thing isn't the issue, then what really is it? The earlier-mentioned "better safe than sorry" idea of avoiding hypothetical and non-existent naming conflicts has already been shown to be out of proportion and more like "sorry now and not much safer". Consistency across copyrights isn't actually consistent and will require future maintenance of entire copyrights instead of just a few character tags.

To just solve naming conflicts case-by-case is the simpler and clearer, and therefore better solution.

(edited to clarify a couple points)

My stance is that:

• Tag names should be short.
• Tag names should be predictable.

Dropping qualifiers makes tags shorter, but unpredictable. You can't tell how a tag should be written before you see it. Tag lists become confusing, because some characters randomly have qualifiers and some don't. There's no rule you can remember here, you're basically forced to memorize which characters have qualifiers and which don't.

I think predictability wins here. It's really painful if a copyright has hundreds of characters and it's completely random which ones have qualifiers and which don't. Qualifying everything means the tags may be longer, but they're easier to remember. Obscure characters are easier to recognize. Tag lists are consistent. There's no arguing over which characters need qualifiers and which don't. And we don't have to repeat these arguments every six months every time a new flavor of the month gacha game comes out (I'm looking at you, Blue Archive and Umamusume). I absolutely do not want to have to go through 100+ characters for every new game and decide, for every single one, whether it truly needs a qualifier or not.

For these reasons I think it's easiest to just qualify everything for gacha games with huge casts of characters. We already do this for most other gacha games, including Kantai Collection, Azur Lane, Arknights, Fate/Grand Order, and Girls Frontline. Doing it for Genshin Impact is no worse than what we're doing for other games. It's something that I think most users have come to expect by now, that if it's a gacha game, then most of the characters are probably going to be qualified.

(Frankly, I'm not a fan of using last names for Genshin Impact characters either, because it's completely random which characters have last names, and as far as I know most of them barely come up in-game.)

The bulk update request #5352 (forum #184908) has been rejected by @evazion.

The bulk update request #5353 (forum #184909) has been rejected by @evazion.

But ... It's not completely random which tags have qualifiers and which don't, it's about which character names actually sound ambiguous and need a qualifier.

There's a point for these gachas to need qualifiers for all of their cast: the characters are based on pre-existing things, such as battleships, weapons or historical/mythological figures, so by nature their names will be ambiguous and thus a qualifier is needed for them. Genshim Impact and Arknight don't fit in this case because the character names in these games are unique and original. It's not different from giving a qualifier to Kurapika from HxH just because its a single name (and it would be another qualifier with no real purpose as well).

mongirlfan said:

But ... It's not completely random which tags have qualifiers and which don't, it's about which character names actually sound ambiguous and need a qualifier.

As someone who has been lurking through this whole thing, including several conversations on Discord, I do agree that it's not completely random. It feels random because the threshold for what "unique" or "ambiguous" for each name means varies from person to person.

Some people will point to some of those Chinese names and say that they will never be used again. Some people will say it's a real Chinese name. Then the first will say "we'll make a BUR when it comes up".

And it turns into a loop like that of whether or not "Baron Bunny" is unique enough to not warrant a qualifier until someone does what Unb did in the first response and then it starts all over for the next name.

And once that all breaks down and we strip away all the faff, we're ultimately left with Evazion's statements right there vs. "qualifiers are ugly".

Well, that's an unexpected ending.

Akiraka8 said:

Do people want more information about a tag on the fly through the autocomplete feature? You don't achieve that by smashing two different database fields into a conjoined 2-dimensional frankenfield. Don't use a hammer when you need a screwdriver.

I would totally agree with you if danbooru's search bar works like a certain R-18 site where I can just type "barbara, genshin" and get what everyone expects to get.

But alas, danbooru went with the strict query path and I can't be the only one who doesn't know barbara's full name is barbara pegg. It also resulted in hilarious situation where we have to alias a character's name if their first name is more popular (e.g. reimu).

So for plebeians like me who only have minimal exposure to a character via memes and reddit, my options are basically down to:

• search for the copyright and hope to be lucky
• look up the wiki for the character's full name
• googling "barbara genshin danbooru" (I'm still surprised at how well this trick works)

Vezral said:

It also resulted in hilarious situation where we have to alias a character's name if their first name is more popular (e.g. reimu).

Afaik there was in the past an algorithm in the autocomplete which showed the full tag if you only typed in the first name (so for example, "sakuya" would bring you "izayoi_sakuya"), but since it has been changed that feature has been lost.
I was pretty much forced to learn every touhou character's surname because reimu is the only character (along with like Marisa and Tenshi) who has her western name order aliased to the jp name order...

One could make the argument "just search for *_reimu, it shows up in the autocomplete", but it only shows up in the autocomplete if you type in the name completely without errors, and i doubt many people know of the wildcard feature.

I don't think it's a good idea to use full names over qualifiers unless they're very prominent. If you don't play Genshin, search for "barbara", and see "barbara_(genshin_impact)" in the autocomplete list, you'll immediately know that's who you want. If you see "barbara_pegg" at the top, would you know? I hadn't ever seen that surname until today either.

ルーミア said:

I don't think it's a good idea to use full names over qualifiers unless they're very prominent. If you don't play Genshin, search for "barbara", and see "barbara_(genshin_impact)" in the autocomplete list, you'll immediately know that's who you want. If you see "barbara_pegg" at the top, would you know? I hadn't ever seen that surname until today either.

I think it's a perfectly normal idea - it's the character's name, so it's the tag the character gets. It's as accurate as can be, and it avoid having to staple a qualifier for reasons qualifiers are normally stapled onto characters. Isn't this the way character tags are handled with basically every franchise that isn't a gacha game, even if the characters have obscure full names that might not be super widely known?
It's only really with gachas that it's been decided that this tagging method should be more prevalent. I think much like mongirlfan said above, it's not "random" and qualifying some of these characters is basically like qualifying Kurapika because it's a single name and who knows maybe in 2077 some other franchise will have a character named Kurapika - or because HxH has some other disambiguated characters so the entire franchise gets disambiguated for consistency. This is another case of "make gacha consistent with themselves and inconsistent with the rest of the site".

Astolfo said:

I think it's a perfectly normal idea - it's the character's name, so it's the tag the character gets. It's as accurate as can be, and it avoid having to staple a qualifier for reasons qualifiers are normally stapled onto characters. Isn't this the way character tags are handled with basically every franchise that isn't a gacha game, even if the characters have obscure full names that might not be super widely known?
It's only really with gachas that it's been decided that this tagging method should be more prevalent. I think much like mongirlfan said above, it's not "random" and qualifying some of these characters is basically like qualifying Kurapika because it's a single name and who knows maybe in 2077 some other franchise will have a character named Kurapika. This is another case of "make gacha consistent with themselves and inconsistent with the rest of the site".

I'd just prefer using tags people will actually recognize, but hey if being "more correct" is more important than being useful then whatever works. With non-gacha properties at least they generally have a prominent full name featured while in gacha (or at least Genshin/Arknights) they are given in an introduction on some website and not really available in game, or in some lore archives you can't view unless you're already invested in the game.

There are tons of characters that are referred to most if not all the time by their first name or by a popular nickname but are still tagged by their full name, which is the correct approach. Midoriya Izuku is referred almost all the time as "Deku" and he's not tagged as "Deku (Boku no Hero Academia)".

Vezral said:

But alas, danbooru went with the strict query path and I can't be the only one who doesn't know barbara's full name is barbara pegg.

That's true for sure. If you see a meme on Reddit with Barbara, you'll first see "cute blonde twintail girl from Genshin" before you know what her name is. But that's what I would search for in that situation, rather than worrying about her name first: "genshin_impact blonde_hair twintails" brings up almost all Barbara results, and then you also see what her name is from that. I do get what you're saying though. If you know that her name is Barbara, you should expect some reasonable luck by typing that.

ルーミア said:

I'd just prefer using tags people will actually recognize, but hey if being "more correct" is more important than being useful then whatever works.

Hard to argue against tags being useful. But I'm still of the mind that if a character's official name is "Barbara Pegg", then the tag should say "barbara_pegg" because that's both unique and accurate.

On some level it bothers me that Touhou would likely be given the same treatment if it were a modern game. The list of characters would keep growing, and people would start to find it inconvenient to search, and then they'd think about qualifiers. But in general, the whole site still favours these accurate and full tags. If you take the pure usability perspective to its fullest, we'd have shinji_(evangelion) and tons of others like that match the 'search query' style of tag. Right now, typing "shinji" by itself doesn't put ikari_shinji in the auto-complete.

Username_Hidden said:

Afaik there was in the past an algorithm in the autocomplete which showed the full tag if you only typed in the first name ...

One could make the argument "just search for *_reimu, it shows up in the autocomplete", but it only shows up in the autocomplete if you type in the name completely without errors, and i doubt many people know of the wildcard feature.

There must have been a reason to drop that algorithm, but it would be helpful for cases like this. More people definitely need to know about the wildcard feature.

Just an idea here, and I admit I'm not nearly qualified enough in the inner workings of the site to know if this is feasible not, but maybe the auto-complete feature could be tweaked to look something like the tag list, with "?" links on the left of the tags. So you'd see "? barbara pegg" at the top of the auto-complete list, and you'd quickly be able to check the wiki, or maybe also be able to hover over the "?" and it can find the most common copyright for that tag, for example. Something like that could add the quick information that people are looking for. Might also be helpful for artists with similar names to see which one is the right one.