Turtles and tortoises

BUR #14473 has been rejected.

create alias tortoise -> turtle

While I am aware that tortoises are biologically a subtype of turtles, I don't think they are distinctive enough to warrant separate tags. Even with an implication, they are easy to mistake for each other:

• post #5955210, post #5978036 - tagged as turtle, but not tortoise, despite being very similar to Wikipedia's top image.
• post #5058312, post #4541312 - tagged as tortoise, despite looking just like regular chibi turtles.

The implication was originally made in topic #4331.

The basic difference in common English is that tortoises has stubby legs and turtles has finns. Thus your first example is correctly tagged turtle and the second chibi example is also correct.

Im sure there are plenty of misstags and cases where one cant tell but an implication seems more reasonable.

The original reason for this was that turtle serves as an umbrella tag for both sea turtles and land turtles (tortoises), so that someone can search for one or the other or both independently.

In practice, most people don't seem to care and just tag turtle without the subtypes, so someone searching only for the subtypes ends up getting cucked out of most results. Just look at turtle underwater -sea_turtle having almost as many results as sea turtle itself.

What's needed here is likely just a bit of gardening to tag one or the other.

I wasn't aware that the sea turtle tag existed, and I doubt I was the only one.

Should this include any freshwater turtles that get posted as well? even though they're technically not sea turtles they look very similar.

eg. ton-chan is a pig-nosed turtle, which is a freshwater turtle.

skylightcrystal said:

I wasn't aware that the sea turtle tag existed, and I doubt I was the only one.

Should this include any freshwater turtles that get posted as well? even though they're technically not sea turtles they look very similar.

eg. ton-chan is a pig-nosed turtle, which is a freshwater turtle.

Imo if a species is visually distinct from generic turtles then it's fine to create a tag for it. We have snapping turtle for example, which is a freshwater turtle, but it would be wrong to lump it with pig-nosed turtles. I wouldn't lump these last ones under sea turtle either because they look pretty different.

The bulk update request #14473 (forum #230633) has been rejected by @nonamethanks.