City, Cityscape, Urban tags are a mess

So it looks (to me at least) like the city, cityscape and urban tags are being used pretty much interchangeably and are a bit of a mess. I'd volunteer to clean these up but I'm not even sure how we mean to distinguish between them. At a minimum I'm going to do some tag gardening in cityscape (post #7697654, post #7651676, etc) for anything that isn't the urban equivalent of a landscape focus.

None of the tags currently implicate/are implicated by anything. That's probably fine but they definitely overlap as currently used.

The last time I saw this discussed it went nowhere and the only response was that "city = when a city forms the setting of the image." Urban exists but on a lot of those posts it doesn't add anything useful or searchable.

The wiki pages aren't helping any:

Just looking for feedback here before I make anything worse. Anything to do here or just leave it alone?

NorthernWing said:

The wiki pages aren't helping any:

I'm not surprised, seeing as they don't tell people how the tags should be used.

Here's my suggestion:

Cityscape should be the tag that is used when the focus of the artwork is the city itself, i.e. the structures, rather than people. (It is supposed to be the urban equivalent of a landscape painting.) If there are people within the image, then they are either out-of-focus, or they're smaller in scale compared to the buildings around them. For example: post #7663943, post #7405853, post #6450305, post #6409156.

Urban should be the tag that is used when the city is a setting, rather than the subject for the image. In other words, the focus are on the people, and the city is just a backdrop for the subjects. I would probably define it along the lines of aesthetic and setting. For example: post #7658079, post #7649165, post #7625324, post #7603550, post #6002803.

Thus, post #6252717 would actually be tagged correctly, and posts like post #7651676 would belong under Urban.

I think it might be best if we depreciate "City" since it's describing a place, rather than an artistic focus to an image. Perhaps we'd have to manually clean up "City" before doing any changes, though.

Largely agreed with winterless above.

Though, I believe rather than depreciating City, it should be aliased to something like Metropolis (and metropolis qualified to something like metropolis_(manga)?). Posts like post #4334960, post #4261789 and post #7343287 where the subject is outside of a city, not the city itself, and the city is a background element are valid use-cases for a city/metropolis tag.

I'm also of the opinion that cityscape encapsulates any depiction of a large scale settlement, so something like post #6151139 is of equal validity to modern or sci-fi urban environments. Meanwhile, urban is largely contemporaneous.

Yeah I think I agree with that. I assume city was intended to be the next logical progression in village -> town -> city where the city is the subject of the image as a distant view/background element, and aliasing to something like 'Metropolis' would help with the confusion.

Cityscape for posts like post #7495170 and post #7248568 with the city as a landscape focus, and Urban for things like post #7104836 in an obvious city setting or background but not the focus of the image.

I'll watch for some more feedback here before I go proposing any BURs/etc.

Yeah, the City tag is going to be a few hundred pages of mess but I'd volunteer to help with some manual cleanup beforehand if we want to push any of this through.

I think that we should start working through these tags, now.

Also, should the wiki be updated with my definitions on what the tags should mean?