Qualifiers and the curious fear around them

So, after a bit of forum diving(I like watching debates in action), I've come across something that makes me wonder.

Whenever talk of tagging comes up, or more specifically, trying to fix tagging, there seems to be a general fear of the idea of adding qualifiers to names. The most recent example I can give of this is the grumbling behind the standard of tagging anyone from Genshin Impact with the aforementioned title.

Why is this? Is it a data limitation that I am unaware of? An attempt to avoid stretching the screen on PC/Mobile? An offense to the idea that someone might not know of a given series? It just seems baffling to me that we would want searches to be harder, especially as time goes on and people reuse names either intentionally or accidentally. Doubly so for names that feature common words for objects/animals.

Would it not be easier to have the qualifiers set up now, when a series is still relatively fresh and therefore doesn't need to spend hours or days fixing names, rather than later when a series has even more characters?

Apologies if this question has an easy answer. I checked the howto to see if there was a direct reason but found nothing that satisfied the scope.

The argument was never about being for or against qualifiers. No one that resisted the Genshin qualifiers was against qualifiers as a concept. If two characters are named just "Sarah", then you obviously can't just tag them both as Sarah, they both need a qualifier so they can have separate tags and be reliably searchable. No one can argue that Musashi\Musashi\Musashi don't need qualifiers, they objectively do.

The arguments are always about whether or not a character actually needs a qualifier, because, historically, qualifiers were for disambiguation, not recognizability. If all we cared about was recognizability, then every single character on the site would get a qualifier, no matter what. The recent arguments about making characters more identifiable was more about tagging than searching, though searching of course has a part, too.

My own opinion, regarding "future proofing", there are dozens of single name characters that don't have qualifiers and haven't needed them for 10+ years. It's not ever been a problem, why start acting like it is or might possibly someday will be now? Also, the idea that it would take hours or days to solve is assuming that an entire copyright would suddenly need qualifiers, when in reality it would be one or two characters at a time, if ever, and would take one simple BUR.

blindVigil said:

My own opinion, regarding "future proofing", there are dozens of single name characters that don't have qualifiers and haven't needed them for 10+ years. It's not ever been a problem, why start acting like it is or might possibly someday will be now?

I wasn't even active on the internet 10 years ago, but i personally believe that that is because things came out at a slower pace. The only "big" copyright that i know existed back then was Touhou.
I think the problem has arisen with the gachas: Nowadays, every 6 months to 1 year, a new gacha comes out and becomes popular. Suddenly there are 50 character tags of a given copyright, with at least 5 being added each month to keep things fresh.
You could have kept up with Touhou games, especially given their popularity and uniqueness of names, plus it mostly amounted to 7 characters every year or two. But to keep up with all of the gachas, you'd need to hook yourself up to a constant feed of news of 10 different games, and, realistically, noone is gonna do that.

But you see, that is the very thing that confuses me. Even if the character in question doesn't outright need a qualifier, why the hostility when someone goes and does it anyway? Isn't having more clear information on the subject better? I can understand not personally wanting to go and give everything in a series a qualifier, but if someone is already going to the effort, why discourage it?

Username_Hidden said:

Specifically I was thinking of old anime characters, that are 10+ years old, don't have qualifiers, and to this day are still the only characters on the site to have their names, but suddenly are appearing in BURs to give them qualifiers they've never needed, and still don't need, usually just because they're "single name tags."

RingyThingy said:

But you see, that is the very thing that confuses me. Even if the character in question doesn't outright need a qualifier, why the hostility when someone goes and does it anyway? Isn't having more clear information on the subject better? I can understand not personally wanting to go and give everything in a series a qualifier, but if someone is already going to the effort, why discourage it?

Well, the argument is mainly to keep tags short and clean.

RingyThingy said:

But you see, that is the very thing that confuses me. Even if the character in question doesn't outright need a qualifier, why the hostility when someone goes and does it anyway? Isn't having more clear information on the subject better? I can understand not personally wanting to go and give everything in a series a qualifier, but if someone is already going to the effort, why discourage it?

Some users think qualifiers are ugly. They also make tags longer, which in some cases forced us to alter the site layout to accommodate the amount of space they were taking up on the side bar. It's also about long standing policy (see howto:character).

...How interesting, that article actually encourages adding qualifiers when a character's presence in a series isn't instantly identifiable, only discouraging when the character's name is the flat out title of the series itself.

So it would appear that the rules are actually in favor of my viewpoint after all, I just missed the page that said so. Thank you for the link and your time, it was quite helpful.

RingyThingy said:

...How interesting, that article actually encourages adding qualifiers when a character's presence in a series isn't instantly identifiable, only discouraging when the character's name is the flat out title of the series itself.

So it would appear that the rules are actually in favor of my viewpoint after all, I just missed the page that said so. Thank you for the link and your time, it was quite helpful.

Wait, where does it say that? I've read that page a dozen times and I've never seen anything that mentions identifiability. The only mentions of qualifiers on that page say if the tag is ambiguous, as in, could potentially be confused for another character or a common term.

Perhaps I took the term ambiguous too generously. Apologies.

If a character's official, full-length name isn't recognizable to people searching it gets into a sort of push and pull between people who want absolute accuracy for a situation where a qualifier isn't needed e.g. Barbara_Pegg vs. what the populace in general would most easily identify e.g. Barabara_(Genshin_Impact). It's partly because people are reluctant to add qualifiers for uncontested/unamambiguous firstname+lastname setups and only really would want them for single word names. However, this leads to cases where some copyrights have characters with qualified one word names interspersed with that firstname+lastname setup, which further confuses casual searches or taggers with what use for that given series.

Qualifiers were supposed to be used when a character name conflicts with another or sounds ambiguous, which may cause confusion (like how its explained on howto:character, and also how Wikipedia does). However, this changed with gacha games apparently, in which virtually every characters gets qualifier even when it's not needed. For gacha games like Kantai Collection, Azur Lane and the Fate series, its understanble that almost every character will get a qualifier because their names aren't originals, they are based on existing ships or historical/fantasy figures. But, other games like Arknights and Genshin Impact inherited this approach of naming character tags and every one of them gets qualifiers when half or most of the cast doesn't actually need it.

More instant visibility where a character belongs to is always better.

In fact, there are more characters that should get qualifiers, like the two girls in post #4579490.
Unique? Probably

But as an uploader, I don't want to check every single time when uploading them.
For Genshin, this argument is only there because it's kinda popular.

Still, instantly knowing where a character belongs to helps to save time. Character tags shouldn't be like learning vocabs like they are from another language.

I don't want to memorize to which a char belongs to, I want to instantly see it.

Provence said:

More instant visibility where a character belongs to is always better.

In fact, there are more characters that should get qualifiers, like the two girls in post #4579490.
Unique? Probably

But as an uploader, I don't want to check every single time when uploading them.
For Genshin, this argument is only there because it's kinda popular.

Still, instantly knowing where a character belongs to helps to save time. Character tags shouldn't be like learning vocabs like they are from another language.

I don't want to memorize to which a char belongs to, I want to instantly see it.

This is exactly one of my issues with this whole debate. This lopsided argument. What makes those two characters any more deserving of qualifiers than literally any other character on this site? No one ever makes this point when talking about characters with multiple word names, it's always single name characters that are argued as not being recognizable enough, as if you wouldn't have this exact same problem if you're unfamiliar with Bleach and have no idea who any of the characters are.

If you're a prolific uploader, you're going to have to do research sometimes. Adding qualifiers to random single name characters isn't going to change that.

blindVigil said:

If you're a prolific uploader, you're going to have to do research sometimes. Adding qualifiers to random single name characters isn't going to change that.

It saves me time for these characters.

Also, as you may have noticed, this whole qualifier charade started recently, so using the argument that many characters don't have qualifiers is therefore flawed.

Provence said:

More instant visibility where a character belongs to is always better.

In fact, there are more characters that should get qualifiers, like the two girls in post #4579490.
Unique? Probably

But as an uploader, I don't want to check every single time when uploading them.
For Genshin, this argument is only there because it's kinda popular.

Still, instantly knowing where a character belongs to helps to save time. Character tags shouldn't be like learning vocabs like they are from another language.

I don't want to memorize to which a char belongs to, I want to instantly see it.

But this isn't the actual purpose of qualifiers. That's the purpose of copyright tags. And it opens prescendent to virtually every single character tag to get a qualifier, which would be disastrous imo.

Provence said:

It saves me time for these characters.

Also, as you may have noticed, this whole qualifier charade started recently, so using the argument that many characters don't have qualifiers is therefore flawed.

Except that's not my argument, because it's a fact that no one is trying to add a qualifier to Shiba Ganju, a character I doubt many people even recogniz if you're not a Bleach fan.

No one is trying to add qualifiers to anyone but single name characters. And always with the arguments of "future proofing" or "identifiability."

Sure, why not add one?

Because it doesn't sound ambiguous and doesn't conflict with other tags. I think that's enough reason.

Provence said:

Sure, why not add one?

Because it would be ugly, unnecessary, and significantly harder to get support for compared to the recently growing, "every single-name character should be qualified no questions asked" push.