Sorry if this is already covered somewhere, but I didn't see it.

When an artist is known by multiple names, with their artwork that's been uploaded here under different names, what's the procedure? Alias everything to the current name, leave everything alone, or what?

What prompted this question is spiggy-the-cat, who's also gone by the names suddenly-steinberg, l1nwerewolfess, zee-chrane, and le_wild_SS (the linked ones having actual uploads here), but I'm pretty certain it's an issue with other artists known by multiple names.

(I can't cite specific examples off the top of my head, but I've ran into trying to upload an image and had it rejected due to being a duplicate, which I didn't see even searching on the name of the to-be-uploaded artist because it was listed under another of their names that I hadn't been previously aware of.)

Generally yes, we try to alias everything to whatever the current name (or most used/known name) is.

Alias, most of the time. Depends on the circumstance, though : what does the artist prefer; are they DNP?; do they want seperate names (zudragon and rudragon are the same artist, just one's NSFW and one's SFW); etc.

or perhaps just use the most current name and have the others in the "other names" field of the tag?

i'm not entirely sure why it'd need aliasing since i though the "other names" thing took care of that instead.

treos said:
i'm not entirely sure why it'd need aliasing since i though the "other names" thing took care of that instead.

They need to be aliased to work in searches.

Japanese nicks are a good example of that. If you only know the original nick and if it hasn't been aliased to whichever tag is used for the artist here, it's pretty hard to find them. Certainly doesn't help that Japanese (and Korean etc) nicks are often mistranslated or otherwise mangled here.