Aliasing monsters to monster.
Reason:
There's no need to have one tag for the plural of another one, as it will only make the search more confusing.
Updated by jxh2154
Posted under General
This topic has been locked.
Hmm, I'd like to announce another call for the normalization of pluralization in aliases. We really shouldn't be aliasing both directions.
I think I prefer the singular form myself (except for dual and mass nouns), but if I remember correctly the consensus was to use the plural (right?), not that it's ever been enforced.
If I'm right, we should flip this one.
Updated
I think you're right but I also agree that I prefer singular, so maybe it's time to drag that dead horse out of the ditch and get the sledgehammers.
Basically my reasoning is: if an image has multiple guns, then it's also true that it has one gun, but the reverse isn't true. Also, I suspect that more images have a singular item than multiples of that item.
スラッシュ, if I asked "Does post #246191 have a gun in it?" the answer would be "yes". If I asked "Does post #246191 have guns in it?" the answer would still be "yes". The same would apply to, say, post #249088. And essentially, those are the questions we are asking danbooru's database when we search for posts by their tags.
So I think both singular and plural are equally valid as tags. You could argue that plural is better because it denotes an unknown quantity, whereas singular denotes an exact quantity (one). You could also argue that singular is better because it is morphologically considered the "default" grammatical number for nouns in English.
0xCCBA696 said:
"Does post #246191 have a gun in it?" the answer would be "yes". If I asked "Does post #246191 have guns in it?" the answer would still be "yes".
I sort of disagree, If you put it the other way (plural asking for singular) it breaks
"Does post #246191 have guns in it?" the answer would be "no", there is only one.
On the other hand:
"Does post #249088 have a gun in it?" the answer would still be "yes", in fact there are two.
This is what スラッシュ was getting at. Singular works for both cases, which is why I'd argue it being more natural.
T5J8F8 said:
leaf vs leaves
You could argue that leaves is most commonly used as a mass noun. Like I alluded above mass nouns don't work the same as countable nouns (though most of them are easy to deal with like water). Dual nouns like pants, breasts or scissors also are naturally plural. The standard countable objects that make up the majority of tags though (apple,gun,book, etc.), I'd say should be singular.
Updated
Shinjidude said:
"Does post #246191 have guns in it?" the answer would be "no", there is only one.
If I actually asked someone that question and they said "No. There's only one." I'd call them pedantic. Which is what _I_ was getting at.
It might be pedantic, but it'd be technically incorrect to say "yes, there are guns".
Think about if you had to answer with a full sentence instead of just yes or no.
For a picture of one gun, asked "Does the picture have guns in it?", would you say:
Yes, there are guns in it.
Yes, there is a gun in it.
or
No, I'm a pedantic bastard, there is only one gun.
You went with the first, which I'd say is wrong, I went with the last which may be asinine. But even the second which is probably the natural answer, is singular.
So... this aliasing request has turned into a discussed debate. I didn't expect this to happen.
However, reading some of the posts I've come to a suggestion: To alias tags to their singular form if they're commonly singular (i.e. bell, bow, ribbon, gun) and alias the rest that are found in plural to their plural form (i.e. cuffs, eyes, pants, panties).
I'm not sure if I explained it well...
Shinjidude said: I was content to keep it settled to begin with, though the debate was brought up again. If it's settled, that's fine, but we should enforce it, i.e. flip the OP's alias.
For the record, I don't much care either way ("Find me images of/with guns" vs "There is a(t least one) gun in this image" - both right, both legitimate ways to look at it), it'd just be a lot of work to reverse every alias manually. I know I've made a lot of single->plural aliases just in the time I've been an admin, and it would suck to have to find and reverse them all. There are of course older ones that never got reversed (like gun), but finding them all is a long term process.
Anyway, I'll switch the gun alias to gun>guns and create monster>monsters.
The good thing about this s>p topic, at least, is that if we ever do reverse policy, no information is lost and we just reverse the alias. Of course, that's not a job *I* would ever want to do.
Updated