Despite searching for a previous topic on this, I couldn't find one. I'm certain it exists, but it may be hidden under an exact title that I didn't have pop up in my results.

Anyways, on topic... Is external knowledge about an image allowed for tagging purposes? For example, say that you know a character shown in an image with no actually visible genitalia is canonically male or female (or anything else on the spectrum), either because they've been depicted in previous images with such equipment or the creator has confirmed a set sex. In the safe image, would you tag the character as their confirmed gender despite the supposed ambiguity, or just flop out an "ambiguous_gender" tag despite being able to see in other images?

I know I'd say "yes, tag them as what they are", but I'd like to hear more opinions on this. Personally, I think it would be silly to not set a character's gender just because they don't have stereotypical identifying features visible.

Losstride said:
Despite searching for a previous topic on this, I couldn't find one. I'm certain it exists, but it may be hidden under an exact title that I didn't have pop up in my results.

Anyways, on topic... Is external knowledge about an image allowed for tagging purposes? For example, say that you know a character shown in an image with no actually visible genitalia is canonically male or female (or anything else on the spectrum), either because they've been depicted in previous images with such equipment or the creator has confirmed a set sex. In the safe image, would you tag the character as their confirmed gender despite the supposed ambiguity, or just flop out an "ambiguous_gender" tag despite being able to see in other images?

I know I'd say "yes, tag them as what they are", but I'd like to hear more opinions on this. Personally, I think it would be silly to not set a character's gender just because they don't have stereotypical identifying features visible.

If the character does not have any features which demonstrate them to be one sex or another, then they get tagged with ambiguous_gender. You do not tag gender based on external sources. It does not matter if a character has been confirmed as male, or has been drawn as female elsewhere, or is well known for having both a vagina and a penis. If none of that is in the picture, it is not relevant for tagging.

That said, it is not nearly as simple as "does the character have a penis?". There are a multitude of factors. Does the character have secondary sexual characteristics? Is their body-shape depicted as masculine or feminine? What about their facial structure? Do they have features generally associated with one gender or another? Prominent eyelashes may be an indication of gender. An hourglass shaped body may be an indication of gender. And so on. But only if those are visible in the image in question.

So yes, we do go by a literal interpretation. The way you are indicating you'd say that things should be done is not correct. External images are not relevant for tagging gender, or just about anything else barring character names and artist names.

Alright. "Excessively literal" it is. I suppose I also can not tag a neutral-looking male as male if their crotch and torso are covered by a towel. Good to know.

The "correct way" is entirely subjective, hence why I even had to broach this topic. In this case, the "correct way" by your standards also doesn't seem to follow basic logic.

You can use external resources to fill in things you might not know (like the species in some lesser artwork), but only if it can be confirmed by what you see.
If an artist says, "this character is a female," but you have convincing evidence it's a male, then it will end with tagging male, for that is what you see.
I often read FA descriptions to find out what sort of species I'm supposed to look at, use that information for tagging after I concluded that the description matches the image.

What you see should override what you know.

Losstride said:
The "correct way" is entirely subjective, hence why I even had to broach this topic.

No, it's not. The correct way is defined fairly well by the site rules. It explicitly excludes use of external information except in a few very limited contexts. Gender tagging is especially well defined, thanks to parasprite's gender tagging flowchart.

savageorange said:
No, it's not. The correct way is defined fairly well by the site rules. It explicitly excludes use of external information except in a few very limited contexts. Gender tagging is especially well defined, thanks to parasprite's gender tagging flowchart.

It is subjective. One person or a group of people decided upon a method to do or define matters based upon their own standards that may deviate from the standards other people hold. Going on that topic would open a whole can of worms about "What is feminine/masculine/whatever by all social standards?" though, and that was not the point of this thread.

Excluding the rules, you could have actually presented your own opinion on the situation. If you personally knew an absolute fact about an image and could prove that fact with evidence on the same site as the image, then wouldn't you at least want to work with that fact despite what the site rules say? An artist who just made and uploaded an image of a character probably would not want to leave out information known about that character just because it's not immediately apparent to others in that one instance.

Losstride said:
If you personally knew an absolute fact about an image and could prove that fact with evidence on the same site as the image, then wouldn't you at least want to work with that fact despite what the site rules say? An artist who just made and uploaded an image of a character probably would not want to leave out information known about that character just because it's not immediately apparent to others in that one instance.

The issue is that we aren't tagging a character's bio, we're tagging visual features. If we wanted to tag bio we could just imply character tags to their canon gender and save all the effort of manually tagging them. However doing so would make the search less predictable and more prone to variation, which we don't find worth the trade-off.

If you haven't already, I'd recommend taking a look at e621:tag what you see (explained). It does a good job of putting the purpose of the rule into context and may help explain it a bit better than I could.

parasprite said:
The issue is that we aren't tagging a character's bio, we're tagging visual features. If we wanted to tag bio we could just imply character tags to their canon gender and save all the effort of manually tagging them. However doing so would make the search less predictable and more prone to variation, which we don't find worth the trade-off.

You know I made a topic about this not too long ago so I'm sure I don't have to say it again but I will. If there is no reason to think that a characters gender is not what it normally is (for example Marty the femboy, if he has no breasts but you can't see his balls some of you fools tag him female for some reason cause he dresses like a girl) then you shouldn't be tagging them outside their "canon" gender. You guys make my tag searching hell sometimes cause if I wana look at pretty femboys (which I do, often) occasionally I need to turn off the male/femboy/girly tag to check if any of my favorite fems if labeled as a female for some odd reason

You guys say that tag what you see works like "If it looks male but has no visible vagina we'll tag it as male" but what you guys end up doing is "I can't see if it has a vagina or not but despite is very clearly male face and ripped abs we're gonna say it's ambiguous gender. We have no idea why you would think this character with no breasts and a defined jaw line would be male lol"

EDIT: It should be far less "Tag what you see" and far more "Tag what is reasonable"

Cynosure said:
occasionally I need to turn off the male/femboy/girly tag to check if any of my favorite fems if labeled as a female for some odd reason

Ever consider making a set for that? It wouldn't exactly help for newly tagged ones, but it would definitely help with finding your known favorites without bad/controversial retagging getting in the way of things.

Also, since you seem to like making collections, you could even make it public if you wanted to. ;)

parasprite said:
Also, since you seem to like making collections, you could even make it public if you wanted to. ;)

My collection https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B67d6QJhDsGTN1V4Nk5jdzVwZTA

Is very much public (Shameless link promotion go check it out 750+ femboys)

But I'm not sure what you mean by "set" I honestly don't know much about this site other then blacklist, forums and tags. I don't know what you mean by set. And the only reason I'm not going to look it up myself is because I'm swapping between warframe reddit here and actually playing warframe so I don't have the time :( Will look at it later if you don't wana explain.

Losstride said:
It is subjective. One person or a group of people decided upon a method to do or define matters based upon their own standards that may deviate from the standards other people hold.

And then, they made that a site rule, and enforced it. ie. turned their subjective ideas about how to best run the site into an objective fact about how the site is run.

The process was subjective. There's very little subjective about the result.

I just want to back up parasprite here, too: the tags exist for searching. The person doing the search will generally have little context on the particular character, unless they are specifically searching a character tag. This is exactly why TWYS was instituted -- so that people didn't search for X, find pictures that obviously aren't X, and promptly retag them -> tag wars.

Losstride said:
"What is feminine/masculine/whatever by all social standards?"

We use biological standards because contrary to popular tumblr opinions most of humanity follows certain sets how their DNA is executed during the entire pregnancy and then puberty thing.

Cynosure said:
You guys say that tag what you see works like "If it looks male but has no visible vagina we'll tag it as male" but what you guys end up doing is "I can't see if it has a vagina or not but despite is very clearly male face and ripped abs we're gonna say it's ambiguous gender. We have no idea why you would think this character with no breasts and a defined jaw line would be male lol"

If you come across something like that then for the love of Dave report them.
We still have people who think ambiguous_gender needs to be on every image without genitals visible and that is plain wrong and not how it's supposed to use.

Alsoztry searching for characters, it's another pet peeve people don't tag characters anywhere well enough as they should, but there are still more than enough character tags floating around to make it a feasible strategy.

Cynosure said:

But I'm not sure what you mean by "set" I honestly don't know much about this site other then blacklist, forums and tags. I don't know what you mean by set. And the only reason I'm not going to look it up myself is because I'm swapping between warframe reddit here and actually playing warframe so I don't have the time :( Will look at it later if you don't wana explain.

Sets are similar to pools, but without rules for what goes in them; they can be used as arbitrary collections on-site (e.g., "hot femboys", dat ass, reaction images/memes, avatars I've used.

Cynosure said:
It should be far less "Tag what you see" and far more "Tag what is reasonable"

The problem with that idea is that "reasonable" is a very subjective term and will be wildly different to different people. A clearly defined "tag what you see" is far more enforceable even if it has its own flaws.

And to be fair, when tag wars occur, the admin that steps in often ends up having to make a call on the most reasonable tag for situation since there's visually some ambiguity. I'd far rather have a select few making the decision on "reasonable" rather than hoping 200k members will be able to agree on what reasonable is.

To be fair, any tagging system will necessarily be at least somewhat subjective, being that looking at a screen and determining that it depicts a recognizable object is a subjective endeavor.

This hold doubly true for tagging gender, as gender is fundamentally a social construct, based mostly on perceived differences between the sexes (which may or may not be based in reality) and statistical trends.

This only applies to gender, for the record. I'm not denying that there are reasonably objective determinants of sex (and honestly few people would go so far as to deny that). But for some reason we use gender tags rather than sex tags (seen in that we have ambiguous_gender rather than ambiguous_sex, among other things).

It would be interesting if we had both gender and sex tags, such that a character could be tagged both as their apparent sex and with their identified / stated gender, but that has major potential to be a tagging nightmare.

My point is though that it's not really fair to say that our tagging system is objective, but it's also not fair to dismiss it for not being objective either. It is highly functional, and that is far more important for most people.

NotMeNotYou said:
We still have people who think ambiguous_gender needs to be on every image without genitals visible and that is plain wrong and not how it's supposed to use.

Where is that kind of tagging most evident?

parasprite said:
(e.g., avatars I've used.

...Damn, really?

I've only known you using your present avatar.

Clawdragons said:
It would be interesting if we had both gender and sex tags, such that a character could be tagged both as their apparent sex and with their identified / stated gender, but that has major potential to be a tagging nightmare.

On e621 "gender" means physical sexual characteristics and has nothing to do with gender identity. Trying to play with gender identity is a nasty can of worms that the TWYS is trying to avoid.

It's certainly one I have no interest in opening (re-opening?).

Wodahseht said:
On e621 "gender" means physical sexual characteristics and has nothing to do with gender identity. Trying to play with gender identity is a nasty can of worms that the TWYS is trying to avoid.

It's certainly one I have no interest in opening (re-opening?).

Except:

1) We use traits which are not actually diagnostic of sex to determine gender.

2) We use the term gender over the term sex, even in the wiki when describing how to tag. Example

I'd like to agree with you and say that we tag sex, rather than gender, but the fact is that we do not. I've tried arguing for that point and lost. We use an awkward mixture of both sex and gender when tagging.

Clawdragons said:
It would be interesting if we had both gender and sex tags, such that a character could be tagged both as their apparent sex and with their identified / stated gender, but that has major potential to be a tagging nightmare.

Pretty sure that has been looked at before, and one of the conclusions was that for 99% of pics (where the character is not unmistakeably performing a gender role or stating their gender), TWYS just wouldn't be possible.

My point is though that it's not really fair to say that our tagging system is objective, but it's also not fair to dismiss it for not being objective either.

Tags aren't objective (though some are much less objective than others -- sexy, lol). But mostly, whether they should be applied on a given pic is; that's what TWYS mostly achieves.

(objectivity is a bit overblown, though. I just get sick of people abusing subjectivity as an argument)

It is highly functional, and that is far more important for most people.

I agree and I think many complainers about TWYS completely miss this -- that it is so far the most functional solution, and depending on off-site information is specifically not functional (searchers don't get what they expect, taggers have wars)

Except:

1) We use traits which are not actually diagnostic of sex to determine gender.

Not sure exactly what you are thinking of here. I initially thought of girly, tomboy, crossdressing, that state 'gender is contrasting with sex'...

2) We use the term gender over the term sex, even in the wiki when describing how to tag. Example

From conversations I've had, that mainly just means it's policy to call sex 'gender' (ie. outright lie about it) for the sake of avoiding confusion between 'sex' as in 'what bits does it have' with 'sex' as in 'a sexual act'.

I regard this as generally nonsensical, but acknowledge that ambiguous_sex actually would itself be ambiguous (ambiguous sexual characteristics? or ambiguous sex act?). I recall a comment from an admin specifically pointing that out.

Wodahseht said:
The problem with that idea is that "reasonable" is a very subjective term and will be wildly different to different people.

What I mean is that the admins should be -reasonable- with tags. For example this image here:

post #510148

Both are boys no doubt. The one on the left has a bulge in his panties making it clear he's got a penis and is male. But Marty (On the right) Has no bulge in his pants and if there is he's hiding it, and his chest is debatable cause of the weird baggy shirt. Some people would argue this is a case of "ambiguous gender" because you can't really tell with Marty on the right as the whole purpose of his character is to be a girly boy, a "femboy" now if you are a reasonable person, you tag this as male and girly for both of them because there's no -reason- to say otherwise.

I experience this all the time because this is the type of fur I like (Femboys) so this is a non-stop experience of seeing girly boys tagged as female for no reason.

I said "It should be far less "Tag what you see" and far more "Tag what is reasonable"

What I meant was:

"If there is no reason to think a character is different from they normally are they should be tagged as they normally are"

For example if you can't see Martys dick, but you don't see big breasts or a vagina then no matter how girly he looks he should be tagged as male and girly. But this being said if for some reason he has huge breasts in one pic but you can't see his dick then you wouldn't tag male because that's not a male characteristic.

GameManiac said:
...Damn, really?

I've only known you using your present avatar.

I meant to put that one in quotes. That one is actually Xch3l's set.

Also, I'm pretty sure I've never changed mine. :V

parasprite said:
Also, I'm pretty sure I've never changed mine. :V

I don't really see myself changing mine either, no matter how much I contemplate doing so.

People already know who I am based on that Rain Silves avatar alone.

Cynosure said:
"If there is no reason to think a character is different from they normally are they should be tagged as they normally are"

that is really bad because.. for example someone who does not know anything about artica sparkle looks up for herm and this would pop up

post #84822

that is not what the user is looking for. they want to see a character with vagina and penis. but the image depicts only what appears to be male and female.
if someone who has herm blacklisted would not be upset with this showing up.
person who is looking for female probably would want to see it.