Donmai

Artist alias request thread

Posted under General

Hyozen

Obst said:

BUR #10786 has been rejected.

create alias guucho -> guucho_(rkrk0898)
create alias handa_akira -> guucho_(rkrk0898)

These two artist tags have the Twitter account https://twitter.com/rkrk0898 in common.

@Obst I forgot to tell you that earlier, if the reason for the qualifier is that guucho is ambiguous, it should be a rename instead. Btw, when aliasing duplicate artists and then aliasing/renaming the remaining artist tag to a non-existent tag to change the name, if we were to follow the new -> old pattern, it's better to alias the dupes first and then aliasing the old tag to the new name in the second line, if the newer artist tag were in the first line in your format, it'd be the same as an old -> new artist alias, which is undesired.

I would suggest to revert the order to new -> old artist instead of old -> new in some of the pending BURs, but looking at some of the recent approved BURs it seems that not everybody is following that pattern yet, unless there are exceptions that I'm not aware.

It may be uncalled, but I think we should have universal and clear guidelines/rules for artist aliases and renames, with good reasoning behind them, otherwise people will just keep making mistakes that others will need to clean and new users coming here will get confused because everyone is following different guidelines. I know that a lot of people will just ignore anything written in the first thread in the first page, like it happens with the other threads, but it's better than nothing.

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evazion

Hyozen said:

It may be uncalled, but I think we should have universal and clear guidelines/rules for artist aliases and renames, with good reasoning behind them, otherwise people will just keep making mistakes that others will need to clean and new users coming here will get confused because everyone is following different guidelines. I know that a lot of people will just ignore anything written in the first thread in the first page, like it happens with the other threads, but it's better than nothing.

The guidelines are this:

  • The artist tag should always be the artist's current name. Otherwise we risk pissing off artists and having them request takedowns because we're still using their old name. This does happen.
  • Try to preserve artist history when possible. When merging two artist entries, if one is very old and the other is brand new, then ideally the new one should be deleted and moved out of the way first. This way the old artist entry can simply be renamed (preserving the edit history), instead of deleted and having its URLs copied to the new artist entry (losing the edit history). To do this, rename the new artist entry to something like new_artist_name_(deleted) and delete it before aliasing the old name to the new name.
  • If both artist entries are equally old, then preserving artist history doesn't matter; one entry has to be deleted either way.
  • Always prefer aliases over renames. If you request a rename, I will silently change it to an alias unless there is very good reason for it to be a rename. It's frustrating to have artist tags silently moved with no pointer to the new name.
  • It's allowed and encouraged to approve your own BURs instead of waiting for an admin.
  • It's allowed and encouraged to approve other users' BURs instead of waiting for an admin.
  • Avoid moving or deleting artist entries by hand. Use BURs to move artists instead.
  • If you do move an artist entry manually, rename it instead of creating a new entry and manually copying the URLs from the old entry to the new one.
  • If you do delete an artist entry manually, always empty out the URLs and put the name of the new artist tag in the other names. This lets people know where the new artist is. The only thing in a deleted artist entry should be the name of the new artist.
  • Never delete an artist entry when it still has posts (search).
  • Never delete an artist entry without emptying out the URLs first (search).
  • Don't put URLs, old names, or things the artist likes to draw in their wiki. These quickly become outdated. These should be removed on sight.
  • Don't use the artist's real name unless they themselves use their real name as their primary handle.
  • Avoid unnecessary qualifiers. Don't add ugly qualifiers to well-known artists just because their name is "too short" or "potentially ambiguous" when it's unlikely for their name to actually conflict with actual tags.
  • If an artist only has a few posts, then it doesn't really matter what we call them. Don't waste time agonizing over artists who are total nobodies.

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