Moving this from dmail to here for open discussion:
Hey, wondering if you might have some info on a tag anomaly. I noticed a while ago that all the chartags under kantai_collection had been reverted to gentags suddenly with no prior discussion in the forums and nothing on the wiki.
Did I miss something? Was there any discussion, or did it just -happen-?
I doubt it's a bug, if that's what you mean.
There hasn't been any discussion on kantai_collection chartags specifically, I believe.
However, it's been decided that tags for ships, planes, etc, should be general tags, not character tags. One recent discussion: topic #9408. So tags like shimakaze_(destroyer) are supposed to be general, since it usually refers to a ship, not a character.
Although that usually refers to one-shot original personifications like post #1158330. Since the kantai_collection characters don't seem to be limited to a single image, maybe they should get separate green tags (eg. shimakaze_(kantai_collection))?
I was erring more towards the effects of an overzealous tagger rather than a bug, but this makes sense.
I would personally differentiate between shimakaze_(kantai_collection) and shimakaze_(destroyer) and likewise to the others, with the latter only tagged if the ship or components of the ship exist in the post (post #1449598, post #1441267).
As it currently stands, only one form of differentiation between the kantai_collection characters exists, which can easily be polluted by unrelated posts like post #968985, post #479819, post #813049, post #935124, etc, which are works/anthromorphizations of the same ships but under different copyrights. With the emerging and (no pun) explosive popularity of this copyright, it feels like best practice to set up the distinction early, not just to keep unrelated posts out of kantai_collection character searches, but also to minimize the number of kantai_collection results appearing in the more generic search terms.