[REJECTED] requesting remove alias motor vehicle -> ground vehicle

BUR #2067 has been rejected.

remove alias motor_vehicle -> ground_vehicle

Reason: post #3584003 (for example)

Is tagged police car
police car implies car (reasonable)
car implies motor vehicle (iffy; the source of lift, thrust and power for spinners has yet, AFAIK, to be elaborated upon. They don't use jet propulsion, at least.)
motor vehicle implies ground vehicle (clearly incorrect).

Flying cars/hovercars are a common enough element in sci-fi and fantasy art that this merits a consideration.

EDIT: The bulk update request #2067 (forum #158699) has been rejected by @Arcana55.

-1

First off, the vehicles in your example post aren't cars. They shouldn't be tagged as police cars. If anything, they should just be tagged with police_vehicle or something.

Second off, the way this site defines motor vehicles is perfectly in line with implying ground vehicles.

From motor vehicle (emphasis added):

A motor vehicle or road vehicle is a self-propelled wheeled vehicle that does not operate on rails, such as trains or trolleys.

While I think removing this alias would definitely be better than the status quo, an alternative would be generalizing police car to something like police vehicle.

Edit: Sniped, though I think it's worth considering that anyone searching for police cars is not necessarily uninterested in the minority of flying or otherwise unusual ones, so I don't think police car really needs to exist as its own tag - the car tag, applied separately, can do the work of narrowing it down.

Edit 2: Probably not worth tagging, but Syd Mead has stated that spinners are "aerodynes" that continually blow air downwards to levitate themselves off the ground, similar to Harrier jets in VTOL mode. This doesn't hold up too well to real world science but that's his problem.

7HS said:

While I think removing this alias would definitely be better than the status quo, an alternative would be generalizing police car to something like police vehicle.

+1 I could get behind something like that.

BrokenEagle98 said:

-1

First off, the vehicles in your example post aren't cars. They shouldn't be tagged as police cars. If anything, they should just be tagged with police_vehicle or something.

The fact that the tag flying_car exists, or even that the concept "flying car" exists in the popular imagination distinct from "personal aircraft", suggests that "car" is, at least hypothetically, not earthbound by definition.

BrokenEagle98 said:

Second off, the way this site defines motor vehicles is perfectly in line with implying ground vehicles.

From motor vehicle (emphasis added):

A motor vehicle or road vehicle is a self-propelled wheeled vehicle that does not operate on rails, such as trains or trolleys.

The definition of motor vehicle on the wiki page dates from December 2011. At that time it was taken verbatim from the then-current en.wikipedia article on "Motor vehicle".

After 7.5 years of wikipedia edits, the definition now reads:

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle (emphasis in original):

A motor vehicle, also known as motorized vehicle or automotive vehicle, is a self-propelled vehicle, commonly wheeled, that does not operate on rails (such as trains or trams) and is used for the transportation of people or cargo.

The current definition does not imply ground vehicle the way it did in 2011. A technicality, I'll admit, but one which demonstrates that definitions are not set in stone.

Arcana55 said:

The fact that the tag flying_car exists, or even that the concept "flying car" exists in the popular imagination distinct from "personal aircraft", suggests that "car" is, at least hypothetically, not earthbound by definition.

I'm not buying this argument. The fact that we have to qualify "flying car" with flying strongly implies that cars are generally understood to be vehicles that do not fly. When I say "car", people take for granted that I'm referring specifically to wheeled passenger vehicles. If I'm talking about something that superficially resembles a car but is flight-capable, calling it "car" isn't enough. I have to specify "flying car", because cars, by definition, do not fly. Flying cars are something else entirely.

The bulk update request #2067 (forum #158699) has been rejected by @Arcana55.