nuke *_school_uniform when the copyright only has one school uniform

BUR #20894 has been rejected.

nuke otonokizaka_school_uniform

(note: the above BUR is an example for voting)

Let's face it, unless a copyright has more than one school uniform, these tags are completely useless. They're padding, they don't add any utility to searches. They're also only usable by people invested in a copyright, because nobody else's gonna remember the name of an anime school of all things.

It's even worse when we tag male and female ones under the same tag despite being completely different visually (tokyo-3_middle_school_uniform comes to mind).

"But how will I search for a character wearing an alternate school uniform?"
ayanami_rei alternate_costume school_uniform. This is a three tag search, but so is ayanami_rei school_uniform -tokyo-3_middle_school_uniform.

Note that it's already impossible to search for specific uniforms being worn by any crossover character. At best you could do something like tracen_school_uniform costume_swap crossover, but that does nothing about single characters and it's equivalent (and inferior in terms of results) to umamusume school_uniform costume_swap crossover, because as I pointed out above, only people very heavily into a copyright are going to know and remember to tag the specific school uniform.

Starting with the NGE school uniform for voting purposes, we can go down the list and nuke them as we find them.

Couldn't agree more; these tags have always rubbed me the wrong way for those exact reasons. It's completely absurd to create and maintain thousands-strong tags for default school uniforms instead of just tagging the few exception posts with alternate_costume.

"Not everybody tags alternate_costume, so this change is bad." Well, not everyone tags tokyo-3_middle_school_uniform either. Even if we only look at posts that were uploaded after the tag's creation, ie. those most likely to have the tag, there's still many untagged Tokyo-3 uniforms. The problem is markedly worse when you look at older posts from before the tag existed, with hundreds of untagged posts because nobody could be bothered.

"By searching these tags, you can exclude posts with no Tokyo-3 uniforms in them". Especially for newer copyrights with just one school uniform design, such posts are an extreme minority to the point where you often only get a handful of them (if that) every hundred posts. We should not be catering to unrealistic OCD-ridden ideals of perfect exclusion when in reality users can simply ignore the 0-2 false positives per page in a neon_genesis_evangelion school_uniform search.

One of the interesting things to consider with all of these school uniforms is how we got into this position in the first place. According to the Tags tab, the earliest individual school uniform tags in that format were made in March 2014 by mock, encompassing the earliest-tagged Inazuma Eleven school uniforms and the Mitakihara School Uniform from Madoka Magica. After that, tags were made infrequently, until March 2017, when BrokenEagle made the school uniform tags for Girls und Panzer. That's when we see our first actual boom of school uniform tags, following in GuP's example.

It's interesting to note how it would be slightly over a year later after this, in topic #15769, when BE would propose the idea of having school uniform auto-imply tags ending with *_school_uniform in response to someone making a manual BUR for such. That would then be implemented in December 2018, and one could make the argument that the boom this caused in school uniform tags is equal to, if not greater than, that of the GuP school uniform tags (as well as prompted proposals to expand it to include synonyms such as *_academy_uniform [topic #21288, topic #17949], which generally just led to them getting updated to follow the existing format [topic #18266]).

And from then on, its intended use for distinguishing many school uniforms worn by many characters in one copyright (ex. Inazuma and GuP) or particularly unique school uniforms in a copyright with many designs for the many characters wearing said uniform (ex. OG!MadoMagi) was diluted beyond hell to the point we're at now, where school uniforms are made just for the sake of it, and whether or not they're properly tagged is highly dependent on copyright. Something like Tokyo-3's uniform goes severely undertagged, but then you look at other more-contemporaneously popular copyrights and their uniform tags are far more thoroughly tagged.

Now personally, I don't think it should be nuked outright, since it is still a fairly unique-looking school uniform relative to other more egregious cases... though specifically referring here to the female uniform. Part of the reason why I think these school uniform tags exist, specifically focusing on examples like Eva and MadoMagi before it got other uniforms, is to serve as alternatives to specific cosplay tags, because something like Ayanami Rei (cosplay) or Kaname Madoka (cosplay) would likely be dominated by their respective unique outfits (plugsuit and magical girl outfit) as opposed to their school uniforms, so in theory you could funnel ambiguous Eva/MadoMagi school uniform cosplay to the uniform tags, and if it their actual unique outfits, then you can use the proper cosplay tags. In practice however, that's probably not how anyone imagined these. They just likely thought "oo, relatively unique looking school uniform time to make a tag", or "oh, two characters from different copyrights are wearing each other's school uniforms, i need to make specific tags for disambiguation purposes" (ex. post #1416484).

Regardless from all that though, we should probably consider whether or not we should start separating out male and female school uniforms for tagging purposes, since I imagine for quite a few school uniform tags that'd otherwise get canned, that'd be the thing that'd make them actually useful.

No matter how it might be spinned, the idea of keeping hundreds of tags with hundreds or thousands of posts each around for a single edge case every 50 of these tags is stupid. If what justifies these tags is a way to search for a character wearing a school uniform from another copyright, then the answer is to create such a tag, not to keep this mess.

If people really want to search for this kind of things, then borrowed school uniform can be created. It can't be replaced with a tag search even if you try to go beyond gold users' tag limits, so I see no reason not to have it.

Your example using Neon Genesis Evangelion is unfortunately a poor choice due to the fact that at least one of the spin-off series had their own completely different school uniform. Even if there does not appear to be depictions of it on the site, the NGE franchise is still prone to spin-offs where that may not be true in the future since we already have at least one example of it.

GreyOmega4K said:

Your example using Neon Genesis Evangelion is unfortunately a poor choice due to the fact that at least one of the spin-off series had their own completely different school uniform. Even if there does not appear to be depictions of it on the site, the NGE franchise is still prone to spin-offs where that may not be true in the future since we already have at least one example of it.

It was just an example for the sake of voting. Ironically the school uniform for neon_genesis_evangelion_gakuen_datenroku doesn't even have a tag, because we don't have any uploader obsessed with padding their tag count for that copyright.

For now I replaced it with otonokizaka_school_uniform, a tag that even admits it's just an umbrella tag for multiple different school uniforms.

Given how rare these contentious edge cases are, I'd much rather we switch to borrowed school uniform (for different uniforms from other franchises or even different schools from the same series, just filter with crossover for one or the other) or alternate school uniform (for non-canon ones) than keep around these tags.

I'll populate those two tags when I have time and we'll see what the size difference is.

While typing this reply I remembered Love Live! School Idol Project has both Otonokizaka School Uniform and UTX School Uniform, so as proposed both of these could stay, right?

Damian0358 said:

...

And from then on, its intended use for distinguishing many school uniforms worn by many characters in one copyright (ex. Inazuma and GuP) or particularly unique school uniforms in a copyright with many designs for the many characters wearing said uniform (ex. OG!MadoMagi) was diluted beyond hell to the point we're at now, where school uniforms are made just for the sake of it, and whether or not they're properly tagged is highly dependent on copyright. Something like Tokyo-3's uniform goes severely undertagged, but then you look at other more-contemporaneously popular copyrights and their uniform tags are far more thoroughly tagged.

I suspect trying to make "uniqueness" a factor in whether it should exist is doomed as a concept. To me, Otonokizaka and Uranohoshi uniforms look pretty unique in their style, but Shuka doesn't at all, but someone else just might.

Regardless from all that though, we should probably consider whether or not we should start separating out male and female school uniforms for tagging purposes, since I imagine for quite a few school uniform tags that'd otherwise get canned, that'd be the thing that'd make them actually useful.

Should the different summer uniform and winter uniforms be created too then? They can be quite distinct and different, but that would probably balloon the number of tags quite substantially (though it may spur some more usage of these tags).

A paranoid part of my brain also thinks about having to re-tag everything if/when a new uniform gets added.

Finally, I'm also curious how such an approach would interact with multi-copyright franchises like Love Live!, where you can now construct slightly silly searches like otonokizaka_school_uniform uranohoshi_school_uniform nijigasaki_academy_school_uniform yuigaoka_school_uniform. Based on the BUR, I assume NNT intends to treat each of the subseries as it's own copyright? What happens with crossovers like Love Live! School Idol Festival?

If it's the sole costume in a small copyright, I don't think a tag is particularly necessary. In huge copyrights, (copyright) + school uniform becomes increasingly diluted even if the copyright has only one school uniform, and using a patchwork of various different gen tags (cosplay, crossover, alternate costume, official alternate costume, etc.) constantly to either find or filter out edge cases just makes things more inconvenient for little reason IMO. Love Live!, as already mentioned, has more than one school uniform anyway, even only its original incarnation (UTX School Uniform is one the earlier specific tags I created, because it's rarer and harder to find, particularly if looking for images of the main girls who don't go to UTX wearing it).

Damian0358 said:

One of the interesting things to consider with all of these school uniforms is how we got into this position in the first place. According to the Tags tab, the earliest individual school uniform tags in that format were made in March 2014 by mock, encompassing the earliest-tagged Inazuma Eleven school uniforms and the Mitakihara School Uniform from Madoka Magica. After that, tags were made infrequently, until March 2017, when BrokenEagle made the school uniform tags for Girls und Panzer. That's when we see our first actual boom of school uniform tags, following in GuP's example.

This is how it usually goes. Someone creates a tag for a specific purpose, then everyone else blindly copies it without understanding why. In this case, it was first about distinguishing between the different Girls und Panzer uniforms. Then someone sees that we have uniform tags for one series, so that must mean we need uniform tags for every series. It's cargo-cult tagging. Monkey see, monkey do. We have a tag for one thing, so that must mean we need the same tag for everything else.

You can see this in other things like animal ears, or hair ornaments, or clothing colors, or any other umbrella tag that permits an infinite number of variations of the same concept. We started off with things like cat ears and dog ears, then ended up with things like serval ears and African wild dog ears, despite these tags only being used by single Kemono Friends characters. We started off with things like star hair ornament, then ended up with monocle hair ornament and test tube hair ornament, again despite the fact that these ornaments were only used by single characters. We started off tagging things like underwear colors and legwear colors, then ended up with color tags for every piece of clothing in existence (and of course tagging the color of every piece of clothing on a character's body is useless for describing what the character's outfit as a whole actually looks like, so we end up making uniform tags anyway to describe the whole outfit).

This happens because taggers are in love with the act of tagging in itself. It feels good to pick a copyright and search "copyright + school uniform" and add a new tag to ten thousand posts. Nevermind that the reason it was so easy was because the tag is literally identical to a copyright + school uniform search. Then uploaders propagate these tags because it's a free tag on all their posts. Nevermind that the tag itself is useless. What matters is making your tag count go up.

It's interesting to note how it would be slightly over a year later after this, in topic #15769, when BE would propose the idea of having school uniform auto-imply tags ending with *_school_uniform in response to someone making a manual BUR for such. That would then be implemented in December 2018, and one could make the argument that the boom this caused in school uniform tags is equal to, if not greater than, that of the GuP school uniform tags (as well as prompted proposals to expand it to include synonyms such as *_academy_uniform [topic #21288, topic #17949], which generally just led to them getting updated to follow the existing format [topic #18266]).

I've come to regret doing this, for this reason. There are only around 400 school uniform tags, so implying them manually wouldn't have been that big of a deal. Compare this to 200 holding implications. If we did all these school uniform implications manually, we would have seen this coming. One of the things I consider when approving even an obvious implication is whether legitimizing one tag will lead to an explosion of copycat tags.

I like the tags, but I would be OK with borrowed school uniform. It would mean more tags to complete the same search, though.

nonamethanks said:

For now I replaced it with otonokizaka_school_uniform, a tag that even admits it's just an umbrella tag for multiple different school uniforms.

No; you just combine it with summer uniform and winter uniform the same way you don't make a separate tag for a different male uniform. In this case the uniform top is pretty different, but it doesn't need a separate tag. Separate tags for separate schools only.

岩戸鈴芽 said:

Should the different summer uniform and winter uniforms be created too then? They can be quite distinct and different, but that would probably balloon the number of tags quite substantially (though it may spur some more usage of these tags).

That's probably a discussion to be had after we decide whether or not we would want to split them to begin with. I will note though that we do technically have precedent for male and female school uniforms as separate tags. Meiji Schoolgirl Uniform was created in April 2015, contemporaneously to the early *_school_uniform tags. Of course, no one seems to have ever discussed the tag, so the discrepancy seems to have never been addressed. You can't even use the "historical"/"too different from a school uniform" argument here since Soviet School Uniform, made specifically for the maid-like schoolgirl uniforms they had, follows the format.

EB said:

(UTX School Uniform is one the earlier specific tags I created, because it's rarer and harder to find, particularly if looking for images of the main girls who don't go to UTX wearing it).

Fun fact about utx school uniform - the gap between it and the next-made active *_school_uniform tag was nearly two years! You made your tag in September 2014, while the next tag, seidouzan school uniform, was made in February 2016. And then it would take until March 2017 for BE to make the GuP school uniform tags!

Damian0358 said:

That's probably a discussion to be had after we decide whether or not we would want to split them to begin with. I will note though that we do technically have precedent for male and female school uniforms as separate tags. Meiji Schoolgirl Uniform was created in April 2015, contemporaneously to the early *_school_uniform tags. Of course, no one seems to have ever discussed the tag, so the discrepancy seems to have never been addressed.

I'm mostly against this proposal solely since the current system makes it easier for users to pinpoint which specific seifukus to search (and lessening their burden if they're limited to two tags at a time) as well as utility in narrowing down character searches that would otherwise net you mixed results of them in school uniforms/other outfits/birthday suits. As for the given example in the quote, Meiji-era schoolgirl uniforms hold historical value since it's basically an example of period fashion. Though "borrowed school uniform" is doable as it would identify which posts show characters doing cross-series cosplays, idk something screams like a return to oldbooru style with this.

Also if we removed the specific school uniform tags from series that have multiple school settings (like GuP and Love Live), we'd be walking into an identification and search nightmare.

Bottom line:
I'm okay with "don't make specific school uniform tags if there's only one school in the series" and "borrowed school uniform".
I'm not okay with "let's just purge all the specific school uniform tags".

Just as a note - series don't always stay with one school uniform forever. To go back to the Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica example, by the logic outlined by NNT, Mitakihara School Uniform was barely justifiable at the time of its creation in 2014. At the time, MadoMagi had three spinoffs which introduced new schools - Mahou Shoujo Kazumi Magica (Asunaro School Uniform), Mahou Shoujo Oriko Magica (Shiraha Private Academy School Uniform) and Mahou Shoujo Suzune Magica (Akanegasaki Middle School Uniform).

Except none of those three tags existed until 2022, and even now they stand at a total summed count of 15 posts (9 posts before 2014-03-24; compare it to Mitakihara's current count of 10362 posts, and 7123 before 2014-03-24 when the tag was created). A user browsing Danbooru in 2014 would barely even find Madoka Magica posts with the "wrong" school uniform. A user browsing Danbooru in 2022 however would find themself swarmed - Mitakihara had a count of 324 (of new uploads from 2022, that is), while all other PMMM school uniforms totalled at 622 posts (with the amount of school uniforms in the series additionally growing tremendously since 2014; specifically in 2017 and onwards).

What I am getting at - we never know when any given series will release a new story which will shake its school uniform meta. Even the original copyright from the BUR, Neon Genesis Evangelion, turned out to have more school uniforms after all. Which is one of the reasons why I'm opposed to the nuking.

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