According to the wiki entry, anonymous is a tag used to describe art posted anonymously

The artist posting the image was not documented, signed, or sealed, and no name was given by the ORIGINAL artist. This is common for some who post to Image boards such as Futaba based sites like *chan. Not to be confused with Unknown Artist which was redistributed by a person without submitting information of the artist.

so it probably should be of the type "artist", and yet the tag's type is "character".

Most likely someone long ago confused it with the anon tag, which is meant to be used for the green "anonymous" character from chans and such.

I would just change it back to the proper type myself, but as a regular user i can't do that once the number of posts using that tag reaches 100 (iirc), which is the case here, so i'd like to ask a mod/admin/whoever to change it.
I can go through the 300-something posts to change ones depicting Anon character to use "anon" instead later.

Also, wouldn't it be less confusing for the future if "anonymous" was changed to "anonymous_artist", and a new "anonymous" tag was created implied to as an alias of "anon" character?

o.O isn't this what the unknown artist tag is for?

A lot of those are misuses instead of unknown_character (or possibly faceless_male/faceless_female).

Anonymous is intended for stuff like these:

post #828685 post #807046 post #787267 post #768139 post #739841

treos said:
o.O isn't this what the unknown artist tag is for?

uhh, isn't it explained in the wiki quote?
unknown_artist is... well, only unknown at the moment, but is meant to be found out. anonymous is someone who wants to remain unknown.
for example, an artist who doesn't want to draw porn under his official name/nickname, but doesn't care enough to create an alias for that.

Circeus said:
Anonymous is intended for stuff like these: (...)

wiki page says what it's for, and all of these images have the artist tagged...
now, whether this grey/skin-colored faceless dude is supposed to be tagged as Anon too is up to the mods i guess.

There is an anonymous_artist tag that would be better used than just anonymous. I'm not sure why these all couldn't just be put under unknown_artist though.

Anon is basically just shorter version of anonymous and there are so many sites with characteristic for anons, including 4chan and tumblr. Would make far more sense to just alias those and use anonymous_artist when used with artist as it's far more common to see image of anon than to bump into artist who is anon.

treos said:
o.O isn't this what the unknown artist tag is for?

Unknown is for when there's artist but it's unkown. Anonymous artist is used when artist doesn't ever want to be known.

Wodahseht said:
There is an anonymous_artist tag that would be better used than just anonymous. I'm not sure why these all couldn't just be put under unknown_artist though.

oh snap, it already exists, why didn't i check it?
i guess we can just change the description of current anonymous then, and have an admin make it an alias of anon (or the other way around), right?

PS: yeah, i meant alias before, not implication, my bad

Wodahseht said:
There is an anonymous_artist tag that would be better used than just anonymous. I'm not sure why these all couldn't just be put under unknown_artist though.

Anonymous_artist was created (IIRC) for the occasional case when the artist doesn't mind the image being posted but actively doesn't wish to be associated with it.

It's such a mishmash that I'm not sure what to do about it. There's the green guy who's easy enough to tag, but the remaining posts are problematic. It's hard to tell which actually belong under anonymous_artist, and which are just unknown_artist. And then there's couple of references to the Anonymous hacker group mixed in.

Doesn't seem like it could be aliased anywhere. Too many potential mistags. My suggetion: wipe the wiki description, move everything that's currently under anonymous arttags:>0 -unknown_artist to the proper tags, check anonymous arttags:0 for posts that belong in anonymous_artist (though it's hard to tell), and then move the rest to unknown_artist. (And alias anonoymous -> anonymous_(disambiguation).)

Circeus said:
Anonymous_artist was created (IIRC) for the occasional case when the artist doesn't mind the image being posted but actively doesn't wish to be associated with it.

Yep. It's for posts that shouldn't be sourced or otherwise identified, for one reason or an another. Whereas unknown_artist is meant to be used as a temporary tag (though in practice, many will remain unidenfitied).

Anonymous is a "character" drawn by artists who don't want to give the character a face. See: the_weaver.