Nuke mage

The tag is magic. We have no way to tell whether a character is wearing a costume or is the real thing without that tag.

Are you implying there should be a magic_user pool

That point doesn't really matter if i'm trying to find resources for "characters that wear mage clothes". In that case i don't care whether that person is a real magic user or not, i just care that their clothes are mage-like. Consider that wizard contains both lilina posts and nomah posts, so the current standard doesn't hold.
Or the other way around, someone fiddling with potions or books while naked may very well be a mage, although that may be bordering canon tagging.

Either way it goes, as i see it right now this discussion makes more problems than solve them.

And what makes you think a tag called "magic user" would fare better than mage?
No, writing a wiki won't change a thing, because the moment another mona shows up that tag will end up being 90% ass posts, just like mage was.

It's getting really tiresome to have to address again and again these non-arguments that are proven wrong every single time by the actual usage of the tags.
It's even more tiresome when all that's offered is ideas with no actual follow-up. Nobody bothered cleaning up mage or any of the other subset for years. Even after this discussion, everyone had brilliant ideas on how these tags should work but nobody actually tried to clean them properly, which is why the BURs were approved.
There's no reason to believe whatever we try to come up with as a substitute will have a different fate.

ion288 said:

I did spend some time tagging mage based on dress and accessories. I know I didnt finish, I started cleaning baton and tagging feathered wings instead, but now the posts I moved from witch to mage cant be found anymore.

@ion288 you can use this search.

nonamethanks said:

It's even more tiresome when all that's offered is ideas with no actual follow-up. Nobody bothered cleaning up mage or any of the other subset for years. Even after this discussion, everyone had brilliant ideas on how these tags should work but nobody actually tried to clean them properly, which is why the BURs were approved.

I did spend quite some time cleaning up sorcerer and sorceress. Admittedly they might not be too future robust, thought I was expecting them to maybe be aliased to mage if they get mucked up later, using the latter as a catchall term and then narrowing it down with mystical high collar or fur trim or dark aura or such. (Or robe)

Mage was kinda daunting because I wasn't sure what definitions to go with. Did suggest tossing in Vivi Ornitier and robed white mages to set the default "robed" look, though I got distracted (and was kinda hoping that somebody with mass-editing privileges or userscripts could do so). I kinda tag things manually without using scripts, so it's a daunting task for me.

As for the Mona ass matter, if mage was sufficiently populated then it might not have been too much of an issue, maybe?

Eh, not gonna bother now. Mostly a colossal waste of effort now that everything has been nuked or merged. I suppose one can use the abovementioned tags in conjunction with wizard and witch, though now it makes it harder to search for the traditional wizards and witches. To a certain degree, all those "other magic job" tags did help keep nonconventional examples out of wizard and witch.

Though at least one good thing came out of it. Mage staff. This was inspired by forum #187632 to basically help tag the so-called "mage accessories".

Edit:
Anyway... might as well go ahead and nuke the various other fantasy magic classes if that's the preferred approach. Necromancer is filled with Uruha Rushia examples wearing and doing nothing vaguely necromancy-themed (other than a single skull brooch), druid is hard to populate and something like wizard + nature-themed tags gives better results as nonamethanks mentioned earlier, and alchemists are mostly just people wearing magey apparel but with additional potion vials on top. I would prefer to preserve and disambiguate them (or perhaps aliased to mage but with the mage wiki giving search suggestions on how to narrow them down)... but after the recent changes I feel it's no longer worth the effort.

NNescio said:

Mage was kinda daunting because I wasn't sure what definitions to go with.

And that's the issue. We can't even agree on a definition for it, we have to remember that the average user applies an innate understanding to tags. If we have the "mage" tag they won't think "hmm, better read up the definition and apply it literally", they'll just go "this to me looks like a mage, I'll tag it mage", no matter what our wiki says.

Im genuinely tempted to suggest a wizard to witch alias. I know it would fail but there is no real difference to how they are used. The wikis talk about stereotypical garb but most images has a more general "magic user" appearance. There are plenty of boys tagged witch and girls tagged wizard on Danbooru.

nonamethanks said:

And that's the issue. We can't even agree on a definition for it, we have to remember that the average user applies an innate understanding to tags. If we have the "mage" tag they won't think "hmm, better read up the definition and apply it literally", they'll just go "this to me looks like a mage, I'll tag it mage", no matter what our wiki says.

nonamethanks said:

And that's the issue. We can't even agree on a definition for it, we have to remember that the average user applies an innate understanding to tags. If we have the "mage" tag they won't think "hmm, better read up the definition and apply it literally", they'll just go "this to me looks like a mage, I'll tag it mage", no matter what our wiki says.

It could potentially still useful as a fallback/catchall tag for anything that looks like a magic user but doesn't fit the classic wizard or witch look. And people will likely use it that way. With enough examples (and if it's the fallback tag with many others aliased to it), it should be resilient to "Mona ass" flooding.

Principal potential uses:

• Helps people look for the "generic robed magic user" look (using mage + robe) without needing to resort to unreliable negations of priest and priestess and cross (these two also tend to wear robes and wield staves, creating some noise, despite them appearing visually different).
• Helps prevent flooding of wizard and witch with any vaguely magic-user appearing characters.
• Helps gives people something to tag with if they feel it doesn't quite fall under wizard or witch.

Wizard and witch can be used for the first (and the 'third'), which is probably what we should go for now. Though it also means that wizard and witch are going to be filled with a lot of examples that don't fit the "traditional" wizard and witch look, so now people have to use further tags to narrow those down (the *_hat tags, probably). Though... I suppose this approach does make things easier to maintain, in a way.

Edit:

ion288 said:

Im genuinely tempted to suggest a wizard to witch alias. I know it would fail but there is no real difference to how they are used. The wikis talk about stereotypical garb but most images has a more general "magic user" appearance. There are plenty of boys tagged witch and girls tagged wizard on Danbooru.

They were more distinct before sorcerer and sorceress were merged into them. Some of the new female wizards are probably female magic users with a more unisex dark-themed garment that were previously tagged sorcerer. And then some might be people no longer having mage to tag with so they went with wizard.

Anyhow... as mentioned earlier, witch can be readily disambiguated by just chucking ALL the Kirisame Marisa examples that (more than) qualify in. We just haven't been doing so because people didn't want Marisa flooding the tag.

Edit: I'm tempted to suggest a -witch kirisame_marisa witch_hat -hat_removed -alternate_costume -nude -topless -swimsuit -chibi -character_doll -cookie_(touhou) rating:s mass update with witch to "lock down" the "default" witch appearance and make it resilient against future alias suggestions. This is especially so because of mage getting nuked and sorceress being aliased causing witch to be far more "diluted" now and in the future.

Really regret not proposing BURs to mass update Vivi and FF white_mages into mage earlier, to "lock down" the default robed appearance.

nonamethanks said:

It's even more tiresome when all that's offered is ideas with no actual follow-up. Nobody bothered cleaning up mage or any of the other subset for years. Even after this discussion, everyone had brilliant ideas on how these tags should work but nobody actually tried to clean them properly, which is why the BURs were approved.
There's no reason to believe whatever we try to come up with as a substitute will have a different fate.

I wasn't able to join the discussion beforehand because of personal issues, i thought i was gonna join later but the BUR was approved before i could actually join. It surprised me because i wasn't expecting the tag to be nuked