Donmai

Tagging insignificant cameos

Posted under General

There have been several cases where I felt the need to question the merit of tagging a character on an image where said character is either very obscure or merely implied to be present.

Exampels of such cases are shameimaru_aya (initially mistaken for mystia_lorelei) in post #547061, sanada_akihiko in post #555735 and rumia in post #563334.

The reason I question this practice is because, like ラッシュ suggested in post #555735, this is likely not what people searching for this particular character want to find. The same reasoning can be applied to non-character tags as well.

Any thoughts?

Updated by ghostrigger

evazion said:
This recently occurred to me as well. I was thinking we could tag these posts as cameo and just tag the character as character_name_(cameo). It would be somewhat analogous to the cosplay tag.

I think this is a pretty good idea actually! I do like these kinds of informative tags, but I stand by my reasoning that someone who looks for akihiko pictures will not be happy with a result like post #555735. This would be a good compromise I think. Although it relies heavily on diligence and good judgement from the taggers, so it might be smart to keep a close eye on these kinds of tags for a while.

How do we want to treat these sorts of tags with relation to their base tags?

With *_(cosplay) we always include the base tag as well. With *_(cameo) it's less clear to me that people searching for the base tag would want those posts to show up being that the target of their search is a mostly inconsequential element of the post.

On the other hand, I don't see people actually searching for *_(cameo) on it's own. That would limit it's usefulness as a search term, making it valuable only for people scanning the tag lists of posts they're already viewing.

Despite this, I think I'd vote in favor of leaving the base tags off characters that aren't visually prominent and just use cameo *_(cameo).

I say we do it as we do with cosplay and include the base tags as well. It's consistent this way, the _(cameo) tags are not at all obvious (and will be necessarily very infrequent), and for some characters, notably Rumia, the cameo appearances are a running gag she's sort of defined by (cf. every panel in gatau's comics where a character says Naruhodo! (I see!), there's a small ball of Rumia's darkness with her Is that so-).

_(cameo) coupled with base tag isn't really doing anything but adding an extra tag on top of something we're already questioning the worth of.

But I don't really care either way, which I guess means "Okay, go ahead".

I don't think the base tag should be there.

I wasn't aware (or didn't think about the fact) that the base tag was included with cosplays, I find that a bit weird too. If I searched for Hatsune Miku I wouldn't want to find images of her outfit, I'd want images of her. But maybe that's just me. In any case I don't want to find post #498326 when searching for kaito, I reckon.

I do think there's value in tagging the cameos, though.

スラッシュ said:
I wasn't aware (or didn't think about the fact) that the base tag was included with cosplays, I find that a bit weird too. If I searched for Hatsune Miku I wouldn't want to find images of her outfit, I'd want images of her.

I feel the same way. I think the _(cosplay) tag is the only thing needed in those situations. Not to mention, it muddles up a hatsune_miku cosplay tag search, giving you images where Miku is cosplaying and images where someone is cosplaying Miku.

スラッシュ said:
If I searched for Hatsune Miku I wouldn't want to find images of her outfit, I'd want images of her. But maybe that's just me.

That is just you.

If you get unwanted cameos back, just add -cameo. OTOH, if you *don't* get them, there's nothing to suggest you to add one more, terribly obscure tag. That, and the consistency with cosplay tagging.

I think both cosplay and cameo would be more useful if they have the *_(cosplay) and *_(cameo) tags and not the base character tag as well.

Especially for cameos, the point is to try and get rid of noise when people are searching for a character. If the post retains the character tag, that defeats the entire purpose of this thread. The idea is that if someone does want posts with cameos of a certain character (which sounds like a reasonable possibility to me), they can search for the *_(cameo) tag.

As for cosplay, I'd like to reiterate Algasir's point. If we exclude the base tag in these cases, then hatsune_miku cosplay gives you Miku cosplaying as other characters and hatsune_miku_(cosplay) gives you other characters cosplaying as her, which sounds more useful to me at least.

Soljashy said:
[...] hatsune_miku cosplay gives you Miku cosplaying as other characters and hatsune_miku_(cosplay) gives you other characters cosplaying as her [...]

This was raised ages ago by piespy in forum #3433, where it was overruled by concensus then, and has become a grandfather rule (if that makes sense).

I for one, would prefer the distinction, were the current rule not so deeply rooted. It was considered work back two years ago; think how much is necessary now.

However, regardless of the system decided on, consistency should be maintained with both cosplay and cameo tagging rules.

If you only want cosplay of a character search character_(cosplay).

If you want cosplays of and by a character search "character cosplay".

If you only want a character cosplaying search "character cosplay -character_(cosplay)"

It's a fairly well thought-out system but I don't think it fits as well for cameos.

Honestly, I wish the system would allow for relational tagging -- tags specified as applying to other tags, so we could tag (and search) say, for something like cosplay->hatsune_miku for someone cosplaying as hatsune_miku, or hatsune_miku->cosplay for hatsune_miku cosplaying as someone else, or hatsune_miku->smile for hatsune_miku smiling.

Many tags become much less useful when you have a bunch of people in an image, and being able to say "this image has Jill with red hair smiling and Jane with green hair with an open mouth" would be more useful than just saying that it contains Jill and Jane and red and green hair and a smile and an open mouth in some undefined combination.

Not that I think that such a system could seriously be added at this point, but it'd be cool.

Updated

Log said:
It's a fairly well thought-out system but I don't think it fits as well for cameos.

Granted, it might work this way for cosplay (I'll admit that I've never really searched for cosplay pics myself), but I still think the base tag should be omitted for cameos. They are different in that they only ever involve one character.

Xabid said:
Not that I think that such a system could seriously be added at this point, but it'd be cool.

This is certainly feasible from a technical standpoint, but the problem is that everything would have to be retagged, essentially.

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