Tagging discussion: animal_ears/tail and actual animals

Reference: post #819591, which has Yakumo Ran as a non-anthropomorphic (but still nine-tailed) fox, and some anonymous village humans. I apologise to anyone if I accidentally misrepresent their opinions in the following summary; it's not intentional, I just want to save space. Please refer to the post for the full comments.

Summary of events:

• image is posted by F.I.A, tagged (among other things) fox, fox_tail and fox_ears.
• S1eth comments "fox doesn't need the fox_ears and fox_tail tags", and removes them.
• YoruKishi says (paraphrased) "You tag what's there, and they are", and reinstates the tags.
• I say (paraphrased) "I think that's wrong, since a fox having fox ears and a fox tail is the normal state and that doesn't add anything." Having not checked the tag history (which was a mistake on my part), I don't realise this has already been around once, and remove the tags again.
• OOZ662 takes issue with some of my argument (fair enough, my phrasing wasn't the best), and points out rightly that (a) the wikis don't actually say that, and (b) this should be taken up on the forum.

Leaving aside the general "don't bother tagging things that aren't significant" thing (I still think that's basically true, but didn't describe my position terribly well), I strongly feel that adding fox_ears and fox_tail tags to a picture simply because there's a fox in it (by extension, also adding cat_ears and cat_tail to anything with a cat, and so on) is pointless:

• There are few or no images of foxes that don't have normal fox ears (I couldn't find any), so there's no benefit to people searching for fox. (If there were any images of earless foxes, that might be worth tagging.)
• People searching for fox_ears are almost certainly looking for the kemonomimi type on otherwise-humanoid characters, and won't gain anything from having ordinary animals added to their search results. Particularly important for people searching for just animal_ears, which is implied by most other *_ears tags.
• It's not how we've historically tagged things. In a search through fox fox_ears, I couldn't find any posts (except the one in question) where the fox_ears came from a normal animal-type fox - even post #819293, the previous 4koma in the same series (though not uploaded by the same person), doesn't have them tagged.
• While the fox_ears/fox_tail/animal_ears wiki entries don't specifically say anything about anthro/non-anthro use, the fox wiki does: it links to fox_ears and fox_tail specifically for "human-looking characters sporting fox ears" or "[...] with fox tails".

Anyway, enough wall-of-text. Having a revert war on a post would be stupid, so we should try to get a user/mod consensus (and if needed, clarify the wiki entries) instead.

I'm honestly inclined to agree with tagging the ears/tails for non anthropomorphic animals. I would also agree that anyone looking up those tags would most certainly be looking for anthropomorphic and humanoid characters.

For tags that have Chen and Rin as actual cats, a simple "Cat" tag would suffice. And if someone were to actually look for regular animals, they wouldnt really use ears/tails but rather just the name of the animal anyway.

Tagging "_ears"/"_tail" for non-anthropomorphic animal is dumb and a misuse of those tags.

The entire point of these tags is that the ears/tails in question are attatched to girls, not actual animals. Diluting them by including actual animals is beyond stupid.

There are post #716330 and post #569571 off a search of yakumo_ran_(fox) fox_tail fox_ears , and neither has Ran being anything that stands on two legs. But yea, I get what you meant, and will remind myself to try not to do so in the future.

Both of those were tagged erroneously. Fixed.

Well, post #716330 has Ran being Totoro, who actually does stand on two legs - but certainly doesn't look otherwise human, so if we're using that as the main criterion (which seems sensible to me), the ears and tail still shouldn't be tagged.

And to be honest, F.I.A, I'd assumed the original upload was just habit-tagging on your part - "It's got Ran in it, better tag fox_tail; and no hat, so tag the ears too" - and since she has a speaking part it'd be quite easy to miss the bit where she's not in humanoid form. It was the commenters specifically saying we should tag ears/tail on regular animals that really stood out.

Fencedude said: The entire point of these tags is that the ears/tails in question are attatched to girls, not actual animals.

Yes, this. These tags are for more or less human girls (well, or boys) with cat ears. Obviously there will be rare, weird gray areas where it's debatable if the individual is more cat or human but I can't imagine there are many of those. We can take it case by case rather than redefine the tags for their 99.99% usage.

jxh2154 said:
Yes, this. These tags are for more or less human girls (well, or boys) with cat ears.

loveless for some example of male characters with animal ears lol.

Consensus made; I'll dig through my tagging history and undo them later...there are a hell of a lot of posts I've tagged that way.

EDIT: Should the various general tags (i.e. kaenbyou_rin_(cat)) be aliased to their animals to help reinforce that sort of search?

You mean implicated rather than aliased, but yeah, I'd support that if it doesn't clash with the usual "no implications from character tags" policy. (They're not character tags in the usual sense, but they're kind of similar...)

Also it would be nice if the various animal tags implied animal, which they don't at the moment. However, since the list of animals has well over a hundred tags, that might be a bit much work.

OOZ662 said:
EDIT: Should the various general tags (i.e. kaenbyou_rin_(cat)) implicate their animals to help reinforce that sort of search?

I'd agree if it weren't for artists drawing them as blobs with ears and tails.
post #708622, post #728402, post #739131
and toramaru_shou_(tiger) becoming a cat, and inubashiri_momiji_(wolf) being a dog:
post #774098, post #707810

kounishin said:
You mean implicated rather than aliased

Oh...yeah...looks like I posted that around midnight; I was kinda braindead. =P

S1eth said:
I'd agree if it weren't for artists drawing them as blobs with ears and tails.

That's true. Guess it'll just have to be an old-fashioned remember-to-tag-both movement, then.