Making robot an umbrella tag and figuring out android vs cyborg

BUR #10113 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create implication mecha -> robot

robot in theory is meant to be for "everything that doesn't have a more specific tag". That's of course never going to work.
I'm suggesting what was mentioned in topic #17594 some time ago, turning robot into an umbrella tag and having the various types of robots implied to it.

I don't know what to do with android and cyborg. The two tags seem to be used almost identically. I think honestly they should just be aliased together, maybe preserving cyborg as the main tag because android is too prone to canon tagging. topic #16456 comes to mind.
Even the wiki for cyborg says that it's hard to tell them apart.
Thoughts?

nonamethanks said:

I don't know what to do with android and cyborg. The two tags seem to be used almost identically. I think honestly they should just be aliased together, maybe preserving cyborg as the main tag because android is too prone to canon tagging. topic #16456 comes to mind.
Even the wiki for cyborg says that it's hard to tell them apart.
Thoughts?

When it comes to the difference between those two tags it's hard to tell without canon tagging, given how artistic depictions of either can be different. Androids are robots made to look like humans while cyborgs are humans who've had mechanical enhancements. Aliasing the two might not work since posts like post #5278193, post #5286400, and post #5323026 wouldn't be appropriate for cyborg, while cyborg is such a broad concept that a lot of it is just people with a single mechanical body part or implanted weapons. Maybe a more descriptive tag name for cyborg, like cybernetically enhanced could work? Though I guess that's unecessarily long and still prone to canon tagging.

As for robot being an umbrella tag it could work, though I think we should still come up with a tag for miscellaneous robots that isn't series specific like droid is. I'm certain there's users who'll want to look for non-humanoid, non-android bots and flooding with everything from the mecha and humanoid robot tags before making a tag for those types of robots would make it even harder to look for them.

I agree with using robot as a parent tag. Show a mecha to someone who doesn't know what a mecha is, and they'll tell you it's a robot.

To me, a cyborg is a human with robot parts (post #1182847) while an android is an almost-human robot (post #4839174). However, looking through the tags it does seem that there's no real difference between which tag users are adding (and indeed, there are some cases where it could honestly go either way). They're definitely seperate concepts, but if they're not being tagged as such then it might be too much effort to keep them seperate, even if I'd like to see them stay.

Yeah, that's the issue I have with the two tags, they're basically indistinguishable right now. I'd like to be able to search for them separately too, but I don't know if that's feasible for us given the extent of mistagging.

HeeroWingZero said:
post #5278193, post #5286400, and post #5323026 wouldn't be appropriate for cyborg

Wait, wouldn't post #5323026 be a humanoid robot? Because that's how that tag is being used. The wiki mentions star wars droids, but most posts are of robot girls/boys. I guess there's no escaping this can of worms. There's probably need for a larger restructuring of these tags, because humanoid robot is also being used for androids.

I think humanoid robot as it is worded tag-wise right now is just too vague. As most folks don't read wikis, they think "oh, humanoid robot, like androids" (or cyborgs if they forget what the heck a cyborg really is) and basically treat it as an umbrella tag in of itself. "Humanoid" isn't even a word that we use for any other tag (just in discussions like these and wikis), so there's no reference for those using strictly tags to check whether they are using the tag properly.

I don't know how else we could work it, but I feel like it would help if we leveraged mechanical_* for our purposes. The mechanical_* tags already link back to android/cyborg to an extent in their wikis. So if individual mechanical body parts but otherwise still human-looking are indications of android/cyborg, then wouldn't a fully mechanical entity that as a result doesn't look human but still be humanoid (per the wiki) be the opposite of those tags? At the very least, that can allow us to isolate those cases from this discussion and squarely concentrate on the problem that is tagging android/cyborg.

Speaking of droids, maybe it would be a good idea to give that tag a qualifier and deprecate droid.

nonamethanks said:

Wait, wouldn't post #5323026 be a humanoid robot? Because that's how that tag is being used. The wiki mentions star wars droids, but most posts are of robot girls/boys. I guess there's no escaping this can of worms. There's probably need for a larger restructuring of these tags, because humanoid robot is also being used for androids.

It's tricky, but the main thing I noticed in the android wiki is where it says

The difference between a robot and an android is that an android looks mostly human, usually having something resembling skin (though it needn't be skin-colored) and a fully human face.

Which by that account makes borderline characters like the post you linked and Ash fall into android by hitting the minimum requirement of having a human face (as well stuff like post #5088053, post #5148986, and post #4257110 which would be humanoid robot if not for the human faces. There's also some outright mistagging like post #5086509 being under humanoid robot.

Stuff like post #4257140 or Pathfinder is what should definitely be under humanoid robot.

AngryZapdos said:

I agree with using robot as a parent tag. Show a mecha to someone who doesn't know what a mecha is, and they'll tell you it's a robot.

To me, a cyborg is a human with robot parts (post #1182847) while an android is an almost-human robot (post #4839174). However, looking through the tags it does seem that there's no real difference between which tag users are adding (and indeed, there are some cases where it could honestly go either way). They're definitely seperate concepts, but if they're not being tagged as such then it might be too much effort to keep them seperate, even if I'd like to see them stay.

Agree. I've always seen these concepts like this:
Android: a full robot that looks human or could pass as one. It's different than a stereotypical humanoid robot (like C-3PO from Star Wars). Examples: post #4154131, post #4448970
Cyborg: a human with robot parts (such as mechanical arms, legs, etc.). Like post #5232276, post #3919810

The two concepts are very simple to differentiate in theory, but taggers that doesn't know the difference or care to read the wikis will likely mistag it.

A popular ironic case: Android 18 is actually a cyborg by definition rather than an android due to possessing human parts (I mean, she had a daughter), while Android 16 could be treated as Android due to being a full robot.

About the BUR, I think Android as a tag should imply Robot as well.

mongirlfan said:
A popular ironic case: Android 18 is actually a cyborg by definition rather than an android due to possessing human parts (I mean, she had a daughter), while Android 16 could be treated as Android due to being a full robot.

The funny thing about that is that in the original Japanese, they are just called Artificial Humans (人造人間). If you're thinking "wow, that's incredibly vague" that's because it is. It's what allows #17 and #18 to be in the same range as #8 and #16. If we ended up merging android and cyborg as tags, 人造人間 would probably end up being in its Other Names.

I agree with both of the implications.
On the topic of android vs cyborg, I feel like these tags are good in theory (the wikis could use a rewrite, in my opinion), but they need a lot of gardening.
Aliasing them seems like a waste, but unless someone is very confident in their ability to garden them (which would be a lot of work), maybe there's no other choice.

So, uh, how are people supposed to search for things like WALL-E?

Hillside_Moose said:

So, uh, how are people supposed to search for things like WALL-E?

how about a nonhumanoid robot tag?

Hillside_Moose said:

So, uh, how are people supposed to search for things like WALL-E?

It depends on what you want to see. If you mean non-humanoid robots, then with the status quo you have to do robot no_humans -mecha. There's no way right now to also include non-humanoid mechas unless you want a very complex search.
Unfortunately even that search is polluted by people using no humans on robot girls. topic #17099 and topic #17100 come to mind, and after I've had to contact a user earlier today because they added no humans to 500 pictures of naked robot girls, I'm not that much against that alias anymore.

Addendum: i've removed humanoid robot from the BUR for now because I think we first need to fix the mixup between humanoid robot, android and cyborg.

Hillside_Moose said:

So, uh, how are people supposed to search for things like WALL-E?

This is why I've proposed a new tag specific for things like that or R2-D2, though I don't know what'd be a good name for it. Robot is supposed to be the tag for misc non-humanoid robots but it's way too ambiguous of a name, which is why we have this issue to begin with.

nonamethanks said:

It depends on what you want to see. If you mean non-humanoid robots, then with the status quo you have to do robot no_humans -mecha. There's no way right now to also include non-humanoid mechas unless you want a very complex search.
Unfortunately even that search is polluted by people using no humans on robot girls. topic #17099 and topic #17100 come to mind, and after I've had to contact a user earlier today because they added no humans to 500 pictures of naked robot girls, I'm not that much against that alias anymore.

Even if that search weren't polluted, it would still be terrible because adding no_humans means excluding literally thousands of posts where humans are present alongside a non-humanoid robot. Case in point: try searching for pod_(nier_automata) no_humans and see what you're left with. The false negatives are a much bigger issue than the false positives.

A tag specifically for non-humanoid robots is much-needed and long-overdue.

HeeroWingZero said:

Maybe a more descriptive tag name for cyborg, like cybernetically enhanced could work? Though I guess that's unecessarily long and still prone to canon tagging.

I like if we imply that for a cyborg tag.

I believe most people, scifi fans know what a cyborg is but wouldn't necessarily think of cybernetically enhanced off the top of their heads. So we should imply it, that way we can include that tag with every cyborg tag

mongirlfan said:

A popular ironic case: Android 18 is actually a cyborg by definition rather than an android due to possessing human parts (I mean, she had a daughter), while Android 16 could be treated as Android due to being a full robot.

About the BUR, I think Android as a tag should imply Robot as well.

No... i don't think Akira Toyrmaya puts much thought into his stories.

Goku gets strong by training in 400x gravity and he goes super super saiyan god ...um 10? .

We get it. Everyone else is trash and Goku is our only hope. And somehow it's considered good

HeeroWingZero said:

This is why I've proposed a new tag specific for things like that or R2-D2, though I don't know what'd be a good name for it. Robot is supposed to be the tag for misc non-humanoid robots but it's way too ambiguous of a name, which is why we have this issue to begin with.

Well let's take a clue from popular scifi like star wars

Droids? Or bots?

When i hear droid my mind thinks of bots aka robots like R2-D2.

jay19 said:

No... i don't think Akira Toyrmaya puts much thought into his stories.

I kinda agree hehe, but the android background was in fact clarified by Toriyama. Both 17 and 18 were normal humans named Lapis and Lazuli respectively, before being kidnapped and reestructured into "androids" by Dr. Gero (just to clarify, the term "android" in Dragon Ball universe can refer to either cyborg ones like 17 & 18, or robot ones like 13, 16, 19, etc). 16 was designed after Gero's son but he's entirely mechanical. Gero himself becomes a cyborg as he becomes "android 20".

In the end, it's an interesting examples of how both cyborg and android are different.

I guess the tag would have the implications like this:

• Robot
• Android
• Mecha
• Humanoid Robot
• Nonhumanoid Robot

I believe Cyborg would need be entirely separate from this as it's not a robot and to avoid further mistakes with Android. In the Robot wiki, it could be moved to "See also" to reinforce that.

jay19 said:

Well let's take a clue from popular scifi like star wars

Droids? Or bots?

When i hear droid my mind thinks of bots aka robots like R2-D2.

Droid is already a series-specific tag for Star Wars robots similar to the various series-specific mecha designation tags (mobile suit, variable fighter, tactical surface fighter, etc). It's just heavily undertagged, I meant to go through SW posts and populate it but never got around to it.