nuke eyebrows_visible_through_hair

BUR #10168 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

nuke eyebrows_visible_through_hair
deprecate eyebrows_visible_through_hair

The tag is ubiquitous. The tag is useless. The tag is ugly. The tag is, quite simply, bad.

eyebrows_visible_through_hair is a tag that has no feasible use whatsoever. It describes a tiny inconsequential detail that exists on 95% of posts with visible eyebrows and bangs, born either through an artist's laziness or their desire for a character to be more expressive. Nobody is searching for the former, and there are much more specific eyebrow tags at one's disposal to search for the latter (v-shaped_eyebrows, raised_eyebrows etc.).

An argument against this tag's destruction in the past has been that we can exclude it to search for (or that we should be tagging the rarer inverse case of) eyebrows_behind_hair, which is now a moot point due to such a tag already having been created. Even if a group of eyebrow enthusiasts were to wriggle out of the wormwood to protest because "it would help to tag old posts with eyebrows_behind_hair", the fact remains that EVTH likely applies to millions of posts on the site, yet is present on less than 900k of them (of which a tiny fraction are the over 2 million posts from before 2016). The false positives more than drown out any actual results, and as such this tag is not remotely useful even for this niche purpose.

To get this tag to a state where it provides any benefit at all would require a herculean effort from a great number of builders sifting through millions of posts, all for the result of a tag that is barely valuable at all. Not to mention that the effort would need to be ongoing - there is a reason this tag is already missing from such a vast number of eligible posts. evazion put it best in topic #15668 when this was proposed over three and a half years ago:

evazion said:

If you think eyebrows behind hair is worth tagging, then fine, go ahead and populate it. If you believe eyebrows visible through hair is worth keeping, then help populate it too.

The fact is that eyebrows visible through hair is practically nonexistent on posts before 2016. It's on 15k posts out of 2.2 million. I'd wager it should be on at least a million. Nuking the tag makes no difference when it may as well not exist on anything more than two years old anyway.

The reason it's not tagged on older posts is because nobody actually cares. I find it difficult to believe that anyone geniunely has a use for this tag when nobody seems to have even noticed that it's almost completely absent on everything more than a couple years old.

If you think these tags are worth having, then show it by populating them. Otherwise it's meaningless to talk about how these tags should exist unless you intend to populate them, and frankly, and I don't believe anyone seriously does. If you actually do try to populate either of these tags, I think you'll quickly see what an enormous waste of time they really are.

There is no part of this statement I do not agree with. EVTH is now present on about 30k posts from before 2016. In over three and a half years, that number has only increased by 15k even with likely a million untagged posts. If this doesn't prove how little we actually care for this tag, then I don't know what will.

Despite using both eyebrows visible through hair and eyebrows behind hair, I have to agree with the BUR. Nobody is going to search for it and it's also not remarkable enough to make a search page, it's like tagging head, arms, face on every single post that has them.

Edit: nvm.

I was against nuking this tag originally because we didn't have eyebrows behind hair at the time, but that tag was created shortly after the topic, making this one pointless. We might as well tag "human". -eyebrows_visible_through_hair has more correct results than the tag itself.

Theoretically, I could imagine someone wishing to exclude artistic license from realistic.

eyebrows_behind_hair is not a complete inversion. A single eyebrow might be partially visible through hair, partially behind the hair and partially outside the hair. Have a look at post #3705558 where one of the eyebrows is partially visible through hair and the other one isn't. We also have a separate tag no_eyebrows. If someone cares, one may create a new special tag for the special case and start populating it.

I agree with the deprecation. eyebrows_visible_through_hair is the dominant majority case and the images on this site use the style that favors eyebrows_visible_through_hair.

Nuking newer tags on grounds of "it's a lot of work to tag the old posts that came before it" is bizarre reasoning and seemingly goes against progress. Of course the creation of any new tag will mean that it will be undertagged on posts that came before it, for a long time after the tag's creation. It does not mean that it will forever remain so.

Retrospectively tagging older posts is an issue that all newer tags face, not only this one. The number of gentags per post has been on an upwards trajectory since the beginning of this website, also implying that adding more tags to older posts is seldom done.

Tagging older posts, and gardening in general, is an unpopular activity. Often, tags are populated by only a handful of dedicated people. E.g. @ion288 has spent a lot of their time retrospectively fixing the neckwear tags. Had it not been for them, you could make the same argument and nuked all the neckwears.

redtails said:

Nuking newer tags on grounds of "it's a lot of work to tag the old posts that came before it" is bizarre reasoning and seemingly goes against progress. Of course the creation of any new tag will mean that it will be undertagged on posts that came before it, for a long time after the tag's creation. It does not mean that it will forever remain so.

Retrospectively tagging older posts is an issue that all newer tags face, not only this one. The number of gentags per post has been on an upwards trajectory since the beginning of this website, also implying that adding more tags to older posts is seldom done.

Tagging older posts, and gardening in general, is an unpopular activity. Often, tags are populated by only a handful of dedicated people. E.g. @ion288 has spent a lot of their time retrospectively fixing the neckwear tags. Had it not been for them, you could make the same argument and nuked all the neckwears.

Even if people took the time to populate the tag to completion, it would still be useless. It would be the equivalent to a female focus tag, applicable to the vast majority of posts that actually feature eyebrows, as well as not being something anyone would actually search for. It's easier and more sensible to tag the exception, like male focus.

Besides, the argument isn't "it's a lot of work to populate it," it's "if anyone actually cared they would have already done so." I certainly don't care about this tag beyond acknowledging it exists, never even gave it enough thought to realize it's just another filler tag before now. I've never actually searched it, likely never will, and I'm not going to be the one to dedicate my time to populating a pointless tag.

Tagging the norm is not something that should be done.
What's next? Light-skinned_female?

Because that's the logic we would be going with if we keep this eyebrows tag.
Yes, I was against a nuke before, but this tag has simply no practical applications anymore (and probably never did).

blindVigil said:

Even if people took the time to populate the tag to completion, it would still be useless. It would be the equivalent to a female focus tag, applicable to the vast majority of posts that actually feature eyebrows, as well as not being something anyone would actually search for. It's easier and more sensible to tag the exception, like male focus.

Besides, the argument isn't "it's a lot of work to populate it," it's "if anyone actually cared they would have already done so." I certainly don't care about this tag beyond acknowledging it exists, never even gave it enough thought to realize it's just another filler tag before now. I've never actually searched it, likely never will, and I'm not going to be the one to dedicate my time to populating a pointless tag.

I was not clear in what I said.
Nuking a tag needs a valid defensible reason, as a tag (no matter how "useless" it is deemed) still represents voluntary human effort. The reason "it's lowly tagged on posts that came before it" is NOT a valid reason. As for a tag being deemed nukeable when no one has yet spent the time back-populating it, this reasoning is similarly bizarre, and you could not state that it will not happen in the (near) future. A tag being "useless" is similarly NOT valid, as uselessness and usefulness are subjective terms. If eyebrows_visible_through_hair is useful to me, why would anyone's opinion matter more than mine?

You can make the argument that a tag is "useless" in that it is rarely searched for, as this is measurable, but then I invite an admin to provide such statistics and compare those stats to other tags.

As far as I can tell, this tag hits all the boxes in terms of what a gentag should be; i.e. visually recognizable, unambiguous, and part of an artistic style that someone might want to search for or exclude for. Seeing how prevalent this style is in anime-style illustrations, it would make little sense to pretend that it does not exist by not tagging it.

redtails said:
...

Once again, this tag is useless because if it was added to all posts that apply you would basically have the equivalent of just looking at the front page. And that will never happen because it's a useless tag that a lot of people are just not going to bother using.

nonamethanks said:

Once again, this tag is useless because if it was added to all posts that apply you would basically have the equivalent of just looking at the front page. And that will never happen because it's a useless tag that a lot of people are just not going to bother using.

Ignoring points is not a way to resolve a debate. I invite you to look at the arguments and provide tangible defensible evidence, beyond subjective claims.

redtails said:

A tag being "useless" is similarly NOT valid, as uselessness and usefulness are subjective terms. If eyebrows_visible_through_hair is useful to me, why would anyone's opinion matter more than mine?

Because this is a community run site that primarily makes decisions by consensus? A tag that's only useful to one person is a pointless tag, because that one person is not the only one using the site. If the majority agrees a tag is useless, and anyone who disagrees can't provide a clear, objective example of its usefulness, then it's useless.

So, what use does this tag serve the entire userbase? In what way is it more useful than something like female focus? Even if it were fully populated, it still wouldn't be useful for finding exceptions, because -eyebrows_visible_through_hair can include characters without eyebrows, characters wearing headwear that obscures the eyebrows, characters facing away, characters whose faces are out of frame, characters who are bald or whose hair simply doesn't cover their eyebrows, and characters whose eyebrows are covered by their hair. Which of those is a person looking for by subtracting this tag from their search? The only one of those that I don't believe has an easy way to find, if someone really cared to, is a character who isn't bald but whose hair doesn't cover their eyebrows.

redtails said:

Ignoring points is not a way to resolve a debate. I invite you to look at the arguments and provide tangible defensible evidence, beyond subjective claims.

What points, exactly? You haven't really provided much of a proper defense of the tag. All you've done is claim the given reasons for getting rid of it to be invalid.

The fact is, if people think a tag is useful, either to themselves or others, they'll put the work into populating it. The tag has existed for at least 6 years, and no one's put in the work. Unless you're going to put in the work, it's in no way a valid argument to claim that just brcause someone hasn't yet doesn't mean they never will. Objectively, they haven't, and we can't wait 10 years for someone to maybe get around to doing that some day. If we can't say it won't happen, you can't say it will, unless you populate those 2mil+ posts yourself.

redtails said:
If eyebrows_visible_through_hair is useful to me, why would anyone's opinion matter more than mine?

That's literally how the site runs, ultimately evazion will decide if it will stay or not, regardless its useful for some users or not.

This bulk update request is pending automatic rejection in 5 days.

The bulk update request #10168 (forum #211792) has been approved by @evazion.

BUR #10864 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

deprecate eyebrows_visible_through_hair

Its being tagged even as its being nuked.

It's because the deprecate came after a nuke that will take 7 hours to finish. It really should've been first.

The bulk update request #10168 (forum #211792) has been approved by @nonamethanks.