Mexiguy said:
I'm in favor of option 1, it both reduces the burden on non-fans because it doesn't require any previous knowledge and reduces the amount of gardening required from fans.
I'm probably gonna sound like a broken record on this one, but: none of the options would really improve anything for non-fans. They will need prior knowledge regardless to know what is what and who is who and which variant they are currently uploading, just like I would if uploading/tagging any franchise I'm not familiar with.
Non-fans are a non-factor for the tagging convention because non-fans will need to look into things to tag them properly no matter what - the only difference between doing things as they currently are and Option 1 is that in Option 1 they'll tag Astolfo (Fate) (All) if they're unsure and at current they'll tag Astolfo (Fate) if they're unsure. In both cases, if they want to tag the appropriate variant, they have to further look into it.
Even swimsuit variants are sometimes mistagged as it stands despite having a visually descriptive name, because not every drawing of the character in a swimsuit is actually the swimsuit variant, but how does a non-fan know that outside of checking the tags beforehand?
Stubbornly sticking with option 4 is what got us in this mess to begin with.
The mess we're in and we're trying to fix is mainly caused by just not actually sticking to a standard. We have characters with _(fate), characters with _(fate/grand_order), characters without a series qualifier, characters with a catch-all after one single swimsuit variant, characters with 'justified' catch-alls, characters with qualifiers all over the place in a random order, characters with standardised qualifiers, characters with their own naming convention, costumes with a chartag, costumes with a gentag, costumes without a tag at all, etc etc.
This project to begin with was unifying and fixing series and variant qualifiers, and then once that's done, figuring out tagging costumes as well as drastically different ascension levels - not changing the whole tagging convention itself. This "give qualifiers to every variant and overhaul the way we tag Fate" push is only tangentially related to the problem and isn't a necessity at all because the site-wide standard that is Option 4 works in 99% of Fate cases and we can just handle the 1% accordingly.
To go back to the previous thread that lead to this one, my general stance is pretty much identical to these points:
- *_(all) tags should only be used for major characters that have many different appearances across multiple games, like Saber. They're shouldn't be used just because a character shows up in Fate/Grand Order with a new skin or two. Tags like Mordred (Fate) (all) are overkill, all she has is two different versions, a regular version and a swimsuit version.
[...]
Compare this to things like Azur Lane, Overwatch, or League of Legends, where each character has a list of their skins on their wiki, and they're all consistently named, so even if you don't know anything about the character, it's relatively straightforward to figure everything out. You know what your options are. You can go to a character's wiki, click on each skin to see what it looks like, and see how many posts it has. Even if a character has 10 different skins, you can look at them all and figure it out.
- Non-fans WILL have to look up which chartag is the proper one regardless of how we name tags or what convention we follow, so the best thing we can do to help them is remain consistent with other franchises and the rest of the site.
- Catch-all tags are only necessary in the exceptional fringe cases of characters with variants of variants of variants like Saber or Jeanne d'Arc; in every other case the current Danbooru standard (Option 4) is entirely functional even if the character has several costumes forms and variants like BB or Cu Chulainn, exactly as is done outside of Fate with Tracer or Akali or Taihou for example.
So you have Astolfo (Fate) as the base, then implicated by Astolfo (Saber) (Fate), then let's say he gets a swimsuit and a christmas version, Astolfo (Swimsuit Whateverclass) (Fate) Astolfo (Christmas Whateverclass) (Fate) get made and imply the base, and if we get in the business of tagging costumes then we'll have Astolfo (Memories at Trifas) (Fate) Astolfo (Sailor Paladin) (Fate) and whatever else also implying the base. List the variants/skins/whatever on the Astolfo (Fate) wiki, implicate them to the base, and that's that, and it works just like with other franchises; even if F/GO has more than just "costumes" and has CEs and this and that, functionally for tagging purposes they're similar.
There's no need to overhaul the entire tagging nomenclature exclusively for Fate so that it can be consistent with itself but inconsistent with the rest of the site, just for the sake of a few (admittedly big, but few) exceptions that can be counted on one hand.
Treat Fate like every other franchise and keep things standardized and consistent with the rest of the site (which is what would actually help non-fans, rather than making Fate as a whole one big fate exception), and handle the few exceptional characters as they need handling. There are only a handful, and the amount of exceptions probably won't explode whether in a day or a year because the problem children will always be the same (Artoria/Saberfaces, and maybe Liz or such) and we're probably only going to get one or two more exceptions in the coming decade. And if there IS need to overhaul the tagging system for Fate even as it currently is, such as with catch-alls, then that means it's not a Fate-centric concern and there is the same need for other franchises that get several skins per characters, like Overwatch or League of Legends. There's no particular reason to treat Fate as an exception in this regard because Fate as a whole by and large isn't an exception, it just has a few exceptional cases outside the norm and the overwhelming majority of the franchise fits the mold perfectly fine even with variants, and costumes, and CEs, and so on.
I'm going to take a break from the discussion for a bit because I think I've exhausted everything I can say on the subject, but hopefully there's more people weighing in with their thoughts too.