alias kanji, furigana, hiragana, katakana -> japanese text

BUR #16778 has been rejected.

undeprecate japanese_text
create alias furigana -> japanese_text
create alias hiragana -> japanese_text
create alias katakana -> japanese_text
create alias kanji -> japanese_text

These don't help translators, readers, or searchers, and just make searching/tagging/translating harder. They also pad tags (a lot of posts with Japanese text need 2 or 3 of the above, though they're horribly undertagged).

One reason to keep Japanese text searchable would be if you're looking for some art with cool runes you can't read. Examples: post #5977592, post #6269547, post #6265773, post #2111839, post #6096355, post #6283792.
This is often huge kanji, but sometimes actual Japanese symbols too. These posts should be searchable in some capacity, but the distinction between kanji/kana is not particularly important.

Would text focus or big text (doesn't yet exist) be enough to cover everything people want to search? Most of it would be Japanese text anyway.

Alternatives:

• Leave the tag bloat and undertagging of these, but make these imply japanese text instead for ease of searching, etc.
• Removes none of the existing functionality, but also makes it easier to use.
• Deprecate them all
• Japanese text is most prevalent and undertagged, but searching Japanese text is easier than -*_text translated or -*_text translation_request. Which only works with the second tag included.
• Especially if translation request goes in the direction where people only add it if they're truly interested in a translation and not literally every post that's not translated
• Alias furigana (almost always hiragana), hiragana, and katakana to simply kana
• Keeps kanji separate.

We also have archaic japanese text for older Japanese.

[...] having something called “kanji” is inviting smart people to tag literally any image with kanji

You know that japanese_text is marked as deprecated?

Added undeprecation; BUR search didn't show japanese text so I forgot

LQ said:

• Especially if translation request goes in the direction where people only add it if they're truly interested in a translation and not literally every post that's not translated

Using tags subjectively sounds like a really bad idea to me.

That's a lot more important when it's not a meta tag. It's a separate topic that comes up a lot, but when it comes to translations, keeping the number of "requests" down helps ensure that the posts people actually want translated get translated, especially with translations being much harder to do (and less "necessary" than tags). Of course, the *_request format is easy and consistent instead of calling it something like untranslated or no commentary.

Edit: As discussed in topic #22939, commentary:untranslated should theoretically replace commentary request eventually, but that wouldn't work for posts with missing notes/translations, at least not without Japanese text being confidently autodetected.

I would be more for getting rid of these tags entirely, or at least renaming them to something more useful. seriously, what is the point of katakana? its wiki wants it to be used only for non loan words or sound effects, yet those make up a lot of the tag. same thing with hiragana and kanji, these would apply to pretty much all Japanese language translated/translation request posts, to the extent that tagging them seems redundant. people not adding translation request like you say is of course another issue that these “duh” tags don’t solve.

the only valid case I could see is for kanji “art” like the examples brought up, where the characters are given special focus or played with in some way as its wiki currently states. this could easily apply to hiragana/katakana too, however the name should be something less painfully basic and unhelpful.

furigana however I can understand, because unlike hiragana or katakana this is a relatively uncommon choice some artists include in their works.

Attempting to see whether or not these tags had previously seen discussion in the first place yields nothing, at least nothing using the option to search linked tags on the forum. And looking at the tag history of each reveals a lot of meandering, and gives a feeling of "we had an idea for this, but we never really realized it - but we're still going to work on it and keep 'em around," leading us to this situation where they've just slipped through as undertagged messes.

That isn't to say that there isn't anything we could draw from them, though, but in their current form and especially with their current names, I'd just say nuke and deprecate 'em in accordance with the current status quo. Now, in terms of what we can draw from them, we can look at the kanji tag for example. The current rule-set of kanji is incredibly broad for one tag, but it provides a decent avenue for improvement. Take the "featuring [it] as a design element [or] focal point of the image..." rules and separate that out into its own tag for kana and kanji, and a second tag based on the "jokes about the visual appearance of [it]" rule. Each would provide an actual use to taggers (posts focusing on one or multiple kana/kanji that isn't text focus, and posts which play with kana/kanji as a possible pun subtag), though I don't know what you'd exactly call either tag.

But if we're dealing with furigana, we also have to deal with nonstandard furigana. But we could alternatively just rename both furigana and nonstandard furigana to ruby text and nonstandard ruby text, based on the reason Bob brought up, and broaden it beyond just Japanese because it is uncommon in general.

The tags are ambiguous and their wikis dull. Explore the concepts in kanji's wiki as suggested above, that's my opinion.

As text focus has too many images that are predominantly text, like tiny paragraphs, I think the new tag should be called big text. A lot of big text posts would still have text focus, however.
Big text is applicable to all the examples in the OP, and pretty much all artistic text I would ever want to search. It doesn't seem particularly open to misinterpretation or excessive use, and most examples would be JP or English.

What about Chinese text though? They use Kanji...

Jigsy said:

What about Chinese text though? They use Kanji...

no, kanji is a fully Japanese term that means "Chinese characters"; the characters are the same but the pronunciations are different. if we wanted to tag this properly there would be a hanzi tag. kanji chinese_text has 11 posts, so these are all either wrong or both are present.

or if visual distinction and not readability is the only concern, a single tag that encompasses both kanji and hanzi

BUR #16793 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

deprecate kanji
deprecate katakana
deprecate hiragana

My proposals:

• create kanji joke and other specific concepts that are currently lumped together (and thus unsearchable individually) under kanji
• deprecate kanji, katakana, and hiragana, because they're useless padding tags - most posts with text on danbooru have either kanji and hiragana or katakana

I don't know about furigana, it's not that common so it might be useful, but then again a shitton of comics have it. I'm neutral on it.

I never tag it but furigana can be really useful for learning the language.
Kanji should turn into kanji_focus, just tagging kanji on image is not useful but calligraphy stuff are cool.
Can't see any usefulness out of hiragana/katagana tags.
Japanese text is actually a tag I want to have only for the purposes of it being trained with AI to find posts without translation request.

The katakana tag doesn't seem useful the way it's currently used. I did a search for katakana translation request and many of the posts have a mix of hiragana, katakana, and kanji. However, I do think it could be very useful if it were reworked to apply only when the Japanese text in an image is mostly katakana (and if the tag is renamed to "katakana only" or something similar).

I can read hiragana and katakana and know a bit of grammar, but don't know much actual Japanese and often have to rely on handwritten kanji recognition for vocabulary. There are many posts I have no business trying to translate, but it's very easy if the post contains mostly loanwords, character names, or copyright titles. Having a tag that focuses on posts with easily identifiable katakana words like these can give less skilled translators like me something to do and allow the more skilled translators to focus on other posts.

pronebone said:

I never tag it but furigana can be really useful for learning the language.

This didn't occur to me at first, but yeah it might be a good way for users trying to learn the language to search for easy to digest content.

The bulk update request #16778 (forum #241155) has been rejected by @nonamethanks.

The bulk update request #16793 (forum #241219) has been approved by @nonamethanks.

BUR #21764 has been rejected.

undeprecate japanese_text

As far as I know there is currently no way of tagging an artwork as having japanese text.
Yeah, most of the text on this website is japanese text, but there is no way to search for posts containing it unless you remove some of the bigger *_text tags. And if you want to search for the opposite, good luck?
(Even then, it doesn't count for mixed-language_text)

BUR #21766 has been rejected.

undeprecate japanese_commentary

If japanese text gets undeprecated, it would be wise to undeprecate japanese commentary too for those doing commentary translation work as well.