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Donmai

Proposal for new type of tags for pics drawn in memoriam of artists

Posted under Tags

This problem has surfaced again because of Akira Toriyama's recent death, but it's something I first thought about back when Miura died.

The pool:In_Memoriam pool kind of sucks, for many reasons:

  • if multiple people involved in a copyright die, it's impossible to filter down by who exactly a pic is paying tribute to (just look at pool:In_Memoriam dragon_ball date:<2024-03-06)
  • it's objective who exactly a picture is paying tribute to: it's obvious that post #4828157 and post #4720444 are paying tribute to Kentaro Miura, but he's not in the picture, so it's technically wrong to add his character tag there
    • and if we start tagging him there, then there's no real way to filter between actual depictions of the person, and pictures drawn in memory of him.
  • pools have the usual issue of being inferior to tags: no suggestion on upload, no default autocomplete suggestion, people are less likely to use them than tags, etc

I'd like to gather opinions around, and propose, the idea of simply tagging these posts with a new standardized type of qualified tag like toriyama_akira_(in_memoriam) (unsure about the qualifier).
This conforms with the rest of our artist-related tags, such as toriyama akira (style) (or _(character)/_(person)/etc), and it gives us a simple way to filter down for these pictures without compromising on search functionality.
It also allows us to search for these in memoriam tags all at once using the /tags page, and it potentially opens the door for converting the in memoriam pool to a tag. It also opens the way to using this type of qualifier not only for real people, but also for pictures drawn "in memoriam" of fictional characters (good luck finding out if there's examples like that in the pool!).

Thoughts? Doubts? Feel free to drop your braindumps about this here.

I'm not against the idea. The qualifier might be a bit awkward, but I don't know if any of us could really think of a better qualifier for it, so it's the best we've got.

An additional boon to converting these into tags would be that we'd be able to take advantage of the Other Names system which pools miss, listing for example #RIPAkiraToriyama in this example to the proposed tag, allowing it to pop up immediately as a suggestion.

Basically, it's impossible to search for a person in the current system and pollutes other tags.

in_memoriam_of_person or person_(in_memoriam) seem to be the only tagging options. I don't see other better worded alternatives.

The only issue that comes to mind is something I first raised in forum #186144, which is that people might start tagging this potential type of tag on any image drawn after an artist's passing. But then again, if you see this tag as an offshoot of in memoriam commentary (which I'm sure some purple terrorist is going to otherwise create at some point), it's not that bad of a downside and it can be easily gardened.

Updated

nonamethanks said:

Just opened forum #272395 at the same time as you posted this, lmao.

Great minds think alike I guess :P

To reiterate and share my brainfart that I posted in the other topic, my idea was to split up the In Memoriam pool into seperate pools all dedicated to a single person.

But seeing that I overlooked the disadvantages of a pool as mentioned in the OP, I am now more in favour of a proper tag. Anything that needs less maintenance in the long term is an improvement.

Bumping this topic with the unfortunate passing of Rachael Lillis, OG English voice actor of Misty and Jessie from Pokémon.
We now have this tag on a small number of posts without any depiction of her, so this is still something that needs to be tackled.

My personal opinions on the suggestions above:

  • in memoriam - Great clear definition, consistency with the pool name, but a bit bulky
  • memorial - Something that is built in remembrance of a person. Could work for pictures in this case. Is more compact than "in memoriam"
  • epitaph - Is explicitly defined as something written, so stretching it to include images feels weird. Maybe epitaph commentary for the aforementioned purple terrorist?
  • mourning - Feels too heavy for some reason. It's possible to remember someone without mourning.
  • tribute - Does not include death in the definition, so this could be used for living people too. Could be confused with _(style) tags.

For now I'd stick with "in memoriam" with "memorial" being a very close second. But this can always be changed later on. We need a tag first.
So with that in mind:

Would a person_(topic) tag be an idea then? For images that are about a person without the depiction of them.
It would be in line with other _(topic) tags like programming_(topic), and if we then just make a seperate in_memoriam tag it would be even more flexible.

post #7991690 would then be tagged with
jessie (pokemon)
jigglypuff
rachael lillis_(topic)
voice_actor_connection

and post #7991705 would be tagged with
jessie_(pokemon)
misty_(pokemon)
rachael lillis_(topic)
in_memoriam

Honestly, a (topic) type of tags is probably not a bad idea. It could also apply to congratulations/gift arts/wishes for speedy recovery/happy birthday celebrations that don't usually feature the person in any form other than their name somewhere in the picture of commentary.

The main problem is that it goes against more than a decade of voice actor connection tagging, and tags like sakura_ayane would have to be almost completely gutted (which is not that bad of an idea because there's less than 10 posts actually featuring the person in question).

But this warrants a broader forum topic than this one.

Updated

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