Donmai

Is hashtag only commentary useful?

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岩戸鈴芽 said:

symbol-only commentary implies commentary, so this is not true.

I apologize for paraphrasing. The commentary wiki says:

The commentary wiki:
For use on posts where the artist commentary is understandable by the average English speaker.

As-is, post #2132865 is a hashtag-only commentary but it isn't a good candidate for the commentary tag until after it gets translated.

岩戸鈴芽 said:

This tag also isn't meant for granular "what does the commentary say" tagging, one of its big uses would be filtering out, well, hashtag-only commentary posts from a commentary search.

I don't see how it would be effective for that when a hashtag-only commentary can be something simple, like a character name or copyright name, but it can also be any commentary with a pound sign at the beginning like post #2132865 or post #2624744. Sometimes it'll filter out a commentary too.

#StillLoveU

heartattack said:

I apologize for paraphrasing. The commentary wiki says:

As-is, post #2132865 is a hashtag-only commentary but it isn't a good candidate for the commentary tag until after it gets translated.

I don't see how it would be effective for that when a hashtag-only commentary can be something simple, like a character name or copyright name, but it can also be any commentary with a pound sign at the beginning like post #2132865 or post #2624744. Sometimes it'll filter out a commentary too.

#StillLoveU

I've fixed post #2624744's commentary, because it was just incorrectly imported, and I have no reason to believe the same wasn't the case for post #2132865. i've seen a small handful of posts, seemingly mostly from Instagram, where people have non-link hashtags in the commentary, but even calling it a minority would be understating it.

Regardless, the commentary wiki clearly establishes that hashtags in commentary are meta-information that arent treated the same way as other commentary text when it comes to tagging, and this makes sense because of their hyperlink-nature. Sure, I'd say it even makes sense to add a clause excluding hashtag-but-not-link commentaries from hashtag only commentary, since they're not really meta information anymore, just funky formatting, but the fact remains that both the wiki and current practice say to add commentary to posts containing only "normal" hyperlink hashtags, and this would neccesarily imply all hashtag only commentary is also commentary.

岩戸鈴芽 said:

Regardless, the commentary wiki clearly establishes that hashtags in commentary are meta-information that arent treated the same way as other commentary text when it comes to tagging, and this makes sense because of their hyperlink-nature. Sure, I'd say it even makes sense to add a clause excluding hashtag-but-not-link commentaries from hashtag only commentary, since they're not really meta information anymore, just funky formatting, but the fact remains that both the wiki and current practice say to add commentary to posts containing only "normal" hyperlink hashtags, and this would neccesarily imply all hashtag only commentary is also commentary.

Thank you for fixing that commentary.

Twitter formats hashtags as a search link, but when hashtags can be things like the commentary of post #2624744 or post #7218608, it's about as meta as any other non-hashtag commentary on the site.

Why is the current practice to throw untranslated strings of text into the commentary tag because they're hashtags? The thing about hashtags in the commentary wiki is one of the newest additions to that wiki.

Look at the commentaries of post #7262604 and post #7246239. For post #7262604, its commentary is アークナイツ, Arknights in katakana. It's not tagged commentary until it's translated into english. post #7246239 has the same text, but with a pound sign on front. Why would it get to be tagged commentary just because it's also formatted as a link to a twitter search?

We wouldn't tag 初音ミク or アークナイツ or whatever as commentary before it's translated into english, so why tag #初音ミク or #アークナイツ as commentary before they're translated into english?

If the hashtag part of the commentary wiki was meant to apply to cases when the text was translated and the hashtags were not, even then we have partial commentary (or mixed-language commentary as the case may be) for commentaries like that. The hashtag part of the commentary wiki could probably use a rewrite.

#xoxoxo #StopThrowingUntranslatedHashtagsIntoCommentaryPlsNThx

May I point out that oftentimes, artists will use essentially the same hashtag in multiple different languages in order to get more reach? Like just on the first page of hashtag only commentary, I found post #7284271. I don't know about you, but I think having to translate tags that effectively all mean the same thing is just plain redundant.

Not to mention, the way I see it, hashtags are more or less just kinda...there, it feels, oftentimes, when they appear. If I were trying to translate commentary requests, so on the flipside I wouldn't want to see hashtag only commentary in there, since they're, in my opinion, second rung compared to the actual commentary portion (if present).

The difference between regular commentary and hashtags is that, well, they're links. Most people don't seem to really care what the hashtags themselves say, just that they can tell what that link leads to. So for that reason, I think letting hashtag only commentary imply commentary is perfectly fine. I don't imagine too many translators are going to be in a rush to translate hashtags over and over again. It's nice when they are translated, but they're the exception and not the rule to commentary translations.

Maiden_in_Orange said:

May I point out that oftentimes, artists will use essentially the same hashtag in multiple different languages in order to get more reach? Like just on the first page of hashtag only commentary, I found post #7284271. I don't know about you, but I think having to translate tags that effectively all mean the same thing is just plain redundant.

Not to mention, the way I see it, hashtags are more or less just kinda...there, it feels, oftentimes, when they appear. If I were trying to translate commentary requests, so on the flipside I wouldn't want to see hashtag only commentary in there, since they're, in my opinion, second rung compared to the actual commentary portion (if present).

The difference between regular commentary and hashtags is that, well, they're links. Most people don't seem to really care what the hashtags themselves say, just that they can tell what that link leads to. So for that reason, I think letting hashtag only commentary imply commentary is perfectly fine. I don't imagine too many translators are going to be in a rush to translate hashtags over and over again. It's nice when they are translated, but they're the exception and not the rule to commentary translations.

"Oftentimes" and "most people" is not enough reason for an implication. Is manually adding commentary when it applies such a big problem?
Besides, I'm not arguing that posts like post #7284271 should be tagged with commentary request, but that they should be tagged neither with commentary nor commentary request.
Having no implication leaves you the freedom to add commentary or commentary request if you want. For example, post #2132865 deserves commentary request.

viliml said:

"Oftentimes" and "most people" is not enough reason for an implication. Is manually adding commentary when it applies such a big problem?
Besides, I'm not arguing that posts like post #7284271 should be tagged with commentary request, but that they should be tagged neither with commentary nor commentary request.
Having no implication leaves you the freedom to add commentary or commentary request if you want. For example, post #2132865 deserves commentary request.

"clearly meant to apply" is also not something we need to go by if the alternative is to just explain how it *actually* is. I feel like you're proposing we keep the definitions, but change the interpretations? Which just seems... weird?

heartattack said:

<text>

I see, so you're just proposing we change the definitions overall. Personally I'm not a big fan. I see hashtags as a hyperlink with specific formatting, we wouldn't want https://example.com/ to link to anything but https://example.com/ either.
It also leaves room for interpretation where there perhaps shouldn't be, especially since this interpretation may be different based on whether the interpreter knows a certain language. Currently it's basically a hard yes/no, based on whether a reader who only understands English can understand it. However, like Maiden in Orange said, sometimes commentary is just the same word 3 or 4 times (this is very common with Arknights in particular), but other times it's a full grammatical sentence, and other times it's most of a sentence except it's just a LN title, and we can't expect everyone uploading and tagging to be able to differentiate between these options. Yes, post #7218608 has commentary that may be worthwhile translating, but grouping this with "#Arknights #アークナイツ #明日方舟" doesn't seem that useful (and nobody is helped by seeing "#Arknights #Arknights #Arknights").

For translating hashtags when it's worthwhile I prefer to use [tn][/tn], and this doesn't aid searchability thorugh tags, but I just don't think it's necessary, worthwhile and maybe even realistic to do anything else in a way that people who only understand English are able to use it too.

Updated

You guys are mixing meme hashtags with actual commentary. I mostly see actual commentaries in English, on English sites, like lunariavi's Tumblr posts, though we don't import them. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but something like that is what you should consider actual commentary using #.

I started this thread and I'm still leaning against hashtag-only commentary, but implying commentary doesn't stop anyone from searching and translating them or requesting a translation. Ideally, bots could translate simple and common hashtag-only commentaries, leaving complex hashtag commentaries for manual translation, as it already happens with "untitled" commentaries. I'd happily do that if I knew how to code, but I don't.

BUR #27627 has been rejected.

create implication hashtag-only_commentary -> commentary

I feel like this deserves another look. The tag seems pretty established now. Outside of that, nothing has changed. commentary still specifically mentions that it should be used if the only non-translated parts are meta, such as hashtags, meaning hashtag-only commentary should still be a subset of it.

岩戸鈴芽 said:

BUR #27627 has been rejected.

create implication hashtag-only_commentary -> commentary

I feel like this deserves another look. The tag seems pretty established now. Outside of that, nothing has changed. commentary still specifically mentions that it should be used if the only non-translated parts are meta, such as hashtags, meaning hashtag-only commentary should still be a subset of it.

What about unreasonably long hashtags or joke hashtags that require translation?

nonamethanks said:

What about unreasonably long hashtags or joke hashtags that require translation?

Currently commentary also doesn't make an exception for those, so this would just be following that.

I don't know if there's a reasonable way to distinguish meaningless (a.k.a. just copyright name, character name, etc) hashtags from the ones you describe, since it'd basically require at least some surface-level knowledge of the language on the tagger's part. I feel like any attempt to make that distinction is quite likely to end up just being applied to every non-English hashtag, which would be functionally the same as removing that exception for meta-only commentaries.

Tangentially related, if hashtags of any kind are translated, IMO they it should be preferred to put it as a [tn], since one would expect the hashtag text to be part of the URL, and changing the text would break that assumption.

For some reason I just got reminded of this topic, so for some extra reasoning why it should imply it, the symbol-only_commentary wiki reads as follows:

A commentary made entirely of symbols or emojis. Bare, unformatted URLs and hashtags do not count against this tag.

It seems very unintuitive to have a commentary with just hashtags and emojis be considered commentary, but have it suddenly not be that without the emojis.

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