https://e621.net/post/show/1140639/2017-alpha_channel-anthro-big_butt-boots-butt-clot

I've noticed a tagging war on the linked post whereupon the character has been yo-yo'ing between male and female. Recently an administrator said in the comments to keep it female, though I'm curious as to why the ambiguous_gender tag isn't being utilized.

I'm not sure if this the ideal place to ask, but I figured it'd be good at least for illumination.

Samoyed said:
https://e621.net/post/show/1140639/2017-alpha_channel-anthro-big_butt-boots-butt-clot

I've noticed a tagging war on the linked post whereupon the character has been yo-yo'ing between male and female. Recently an administrator said in the comments to keep it female, though I'm curious as to why the ambiguous_gender tag isn't being utilized.

I'm not sure if this the ideal place to ask, but I figured it'd be good at least for illumination.

ambiguous gender is when you cannot determine the gender of a character. Your aforementioned yoyoing means that there are signs of a gender, but they clash with each other.

when character has very feminine body shape, feminine leaning face and no masculine traits, its not ambiguous. the tag "yo-yo'ing" happened because people kept trying to tag the character as male based on external knowledge.

That's where I'm curious. Features like breasts, large bulges, etc. are absent, everything is clothed, and I've seen the hip shape used on male characters as well. Unless one were to take the 'Ms. Pac-Man/Minnie Mouse' eyelashes = female approach of course, but I'm still a bit puzzled.

Yes, the character is male, but that isn't shown. It seems like trying to go back and forth on tagging a Bugs Bunny in drag.

If there is no evidence of genitals (including breasts), we tag by body type; clothing like that doesn't obscure the body; the hips are feminine, and it doesn't matter if it was also used for males.

Here is a gender chart to decipher their gender. I'm willing to assume that you, as well as most others, use a combination of TWYK and TWYS to assume given genders because it's how the character is, but that isn't how it works on site.

Otherwise, I'm siding with Muts and Ratte, they are both the best for consulting gender in anthros.

Siral_Exan said:
If there is no evidence of genitals (including breasts), we tag by body type; clothing like that doesn't obscure the body; the hips are feminine, and it doesn't matter if it was also used for males.

Here is a gender chart to decipher their gender. I'm willing to assume that you, as well as most others, use a combination of TWYK and TWYS to assume given genders because it's how the character is, but that isn't how it works on site.

Otherwise, I'm siding with Muts and Ratte, they are both the best for consulting gender in anthros.

Ahh, thank you; that chart was clarifying.

Since there is a character tag, isn't it ok to tag his real gender and tag crossdressing? If a character is well known enough the crossdressing tag always prevails, right? For example with Bugs.

Sorrowless said:
Since there is a character tag, isn't it ok to tag his real gender and tag crossdressing? If a character is well known enough the crossdressing tag always prevails, right? For example with Bugs.

No, because that's TWYK (Tag What You Know). That is heavily avoided on this site because there would not be consistent tagging. You can ask about crossgender, but I wouldn't because it's actually our rule that tags them as female, and not possibly artist intention.

Siral_Exan said:
Here is a gender chart to decipher their gender. I'm willing to assume that you, as well as most others, use a combination of TWYK and TWYS to assume given genders because it's how the character is, but that isn't how it works on site.

Is there an equivalent chart or rules for tagging non-anthros with various configurations of slit/cloaca (or other weirder things)?
The wiki gives some guidelines on various pages but in practice the tags are often all over the place, especially on older posts.

Is this a case of "Yeah it's a known issue with no practical solution, so fix it the best you can when you find one", or is there a more specific page I haven't found yet?

Ijerk said:
Is there an equivalent chart or rules for tagging non-anthros with various configurations of slit/cloaca (or other weirder things)?
The wiki gives some guidelines on various pages but in practice the tags are often all over the place, especially on older posts.

Is this a case of "Yeah it's a known issue with no practical solution, so fix it the best you can when you find one", or is there a more specific page I haven't found yet?

There is no chart (there really ought to be), but I know a "universal" cheat sheet: the males of most species are bigger and larger, whereas the females are thinner and smaller, across all features of their body. The big problem is the aforementioned TWYK, as several species use other means to determine their genders (like markings, colors, etc.) that don't translate well to TWYS because of artistic freedom.

It may not be a bad idea to make outlines for each genus' differences and either add them to the individual pages, add it to the gender chart's page, or create a new wiki page entirely.

Siral_Exan said:
There is no chart (there really ought to be), but I know a "universal" cheat sheet: the males of most species are bigger and larger, whereas the females are thinner and smaller, across all features of their body.

Female reptiles and insects are generally larger than the males. And avians are usually of the same size.

Most non-mammalian ferals end up tagged as ambiguous, unless there's visible genitalia. Or slight anthropomorphism, such as feminine eyelashes.

Mutisija said:
when character has very feminine body shape, feminine leaning face and no masculine traits, its not ambiguous. the tag "yo-yo'ing" happened because people kept trying to tag the character as male based on external knowledge.

im sorry mutisija but i really dont see any evidence at all for what your stating other then eyelashes(which can be a part of crossdressing), there is nothing feminine or masculine about the face, and i dont see a feminine body, what i see is a case of hyper butt on this character on a otherwise ambiguous body

I know this may sound a silly question, but: should a post featuring one flora fauna creature that has hermaphrodite flowers be tagged with "herm"?

e.g. post #1044550

Related:

post #1039522 technically is male (tail shape).

O16 said:
I know this may sound a silly question, but: should a post featuring one flora fauna creature that has hermaphrodite flowers be tagged with "herm"?

e.g. post #1044550

Related:

post #1039522 technically is male (tail shape).

For the first, you only tag ( male )herm when both a penis and a pussy, or indicators of, are present in an image. For the second, that and the cleft tail for females is TWYK and thus is not tagged. The shape of the tail, the colors of the fur, even evolutionary trees are ignored if the species can be both genders. It's crossgender if the species is otherwise (for instance, an all female Pokemon gets crossgender if the image shows a male. It doesn't get an intersex tag, though).

I'd say the flower one is a maybe. Plant anatomy may not be known enough by people for it to go under twys.

I support gender differences in fictional creatures but I remember seeing that the admin gave that the twyk flag in the past.

And then you've got yoshis with no visible genitalia and no masculine or feminine features constantly being tagged male. With¹ or without canon information, they should be tagged ambiguous until something suggests otherwise.

¹Yoshis are genderless and reproduce asexually.

BlueDingo said:
And then you've got yoshis with no visible genitalia and no masculine or feminine features constantly being tagged male. With¹ or without canon information, they should be tagged ambiguous until something suggests otherwise.

¹Yoshis are genderless and reproduces asexually.

That sounds like people assuming gender based on TWYK from source. Have you made tickets about that?

Is it still ambiguous if a gender label is explicitly used as a part of the species name?
post #1152492

Ijerk said:
Is it still ambiguous if a gender label is explicitly used as a part of the species name?
post #1152492

Yep. Only the character's appearance in the image is relevant; no mars/venus symbol, no text even if in the image, not the name, not how they dress... the list can continue.

I'd offer citations to an admin's statement for those, but it'd be far too long or a search because it is rarely referred to in simple terms.

Siral_Exan said:
no text even if in the image

Now this one seems wrong to me. It seems like text could easily be a deciding factor?

I think it's better to knowledge tag gender rather than ambiguous in cases like that. Gender is better than non imo. It even has the queen tag...

Clawdragons said:
Now this one seems wrong to me. It seems like text could easily be a deciding factor?

~♂ ~♀ ~model_sheet -anthro -ambiguous_gender rating:s

Yikes. If it is the rule, there's a lot of work to do.

Clawdragons said:
Now this one seems wrong to me. It seems like text could easily be a deciding factor?

I call it the "I don't want to see it" ruling, because the premise is: if you do not want to see the gender, then blacklist the gender tag. Emphasis on see, people can call it whatever they want but for searching/blacklisting purposes you either want to see (only) it, or blacklist (only) it; while you can see text, it doesn't influence how the character looks. Reading a female and seeing a female are, therefore, two separate things.

Siral_Exan said:
[…] For the second, that and the cleft tail for females is TWYK and thus is not tagged. The shape of the tail, the colors of the fur, even evolutionary trees are ignored if the species can be both genders. It's crossgender if the species is otherwise (for instance, an all female Pokemon gets crossgender if the image shows a male. It doesn't get an intersex tag, though).

Most sexual dimorphisms technically are TWYK.

e.g. post #825940 post #1069780

O16 said:
Most sexual dimorphisms technically are TWYK.

e.g. post #825940 post #1069780

Thank you for the word. For the life of me I couldn't remember it, so I went more specific.

O16 said:
Most sexual dimorphisms technically are TWYK.

All names are TYWK as well.

BlueDingo said:
All names are TYWK as well.

We do make an exception for names, and species if not easily determined visually.

Siral_Exan said:
I call it the "I don't want to see it" ruling, because the premise is: if you do not want to see the gender, then blacklist the gender tag. Emphasis on see, people can call it whatever they want but for searching/blacklisting purposes you either want to see (only) it, or blacklist (only) it; while you can see text, it doesn't influence how the character looks. Reading a female and seeing a female are, therefore, two separate things.

I'm going to need an admin source on this.

It seems to me that if a character in, say, a comic is shown in such a way as they would usually be tagged as ambiguous, but the dialogue in said comic was using male pronouns or otherwise giving some evidence that the character was male, that would be good enough.

Clawdragons said:
It seems to me that if a character in, say, a comic is shown in such a way as they would usually be tagged as ambiguous, but the dialogue in said comic was using male pronouns or otherwise giving some evidence that the character was male, that would be good enough.

Yoshis are almost always referred to with male pronouns in english media despite none of them actually being male. Pronouns are not a guarantee, especially when transgenders are involved.

Clawdragons said:
I'm going to need an admin source on this.

It seems to me that if a character in, say, a comic is shown in such a way as they would usually be tagged as ambiguous, but the dialogue in said comic was using male pronouns or otherwise giving some evidence that the character was male, that would be good enough.

Not an admin, but:

We tag what is seen, not said. The words can lie and, as Siral said, the "I do/don't want to see it" rule seems the enforced one.

Clawdragons said:
I'm going to need an admin source on this.

It seems to me that if a character in, say, a comic is shown in such a way as they would usually be tagged as ambiguous, but the dialogue in said comic was using male pronouns or otherwise giving some evidence that the character was male, that would be good enough.

When I asked Ratte to provide you a "source", they replied with this and, at request, translated it to "this is not a pipe". To quote: "Point being, dialogue/text doesn't matter."

They furthered by exclaiming the problem of if we changed all tagged dickgirls to herms just because the ref sheet says so, (and now, in my words) despite the site's difference between dickgirl and herm. Mind you, just like me they are not opposed to lore-based tagging, but as of now it isn't what we go by.

I can provide the intended screenshot if you don't believe me.

Siral_Exan said:
When I asked Ratte to provide you a "source", they replied with this and, at request, translated it to "this is not a pipe". To quote: "Point being, dialogue/text doesn't matter."

It's not a pipe, it's a depiction of a pipe. The text is correct.

BlueDingo said:
It's not a pipe, it's a depiction of a pipe. The text is correct.

But the text isn't referring to the image, it is referring to what's in the image. If you want to go that far, you should easily know when things refer to themselves in comparison to others... "this image is not a pipe" is what you're saying.

Siral_Exan said:
But the text isn't referring to the image, it is referring to what's in the image. If you want to go that far, you should easily know when things refer to themselves in comparison to others... "this image is not a pipe" is what you're saying.

We don't know what "this" is referring to. It could just as easily refer to either the image or the contents of the image, and there's no other text to clarify.

Just like if a tree falls in a forest, it comes down to interpretation.

BlueDingo said:
We don't know what "this" is referring to. It could just as easily refer to either the image or the contents of the image, and there's no other text to clarify.

Just like if a tree falls in a forest, it comes down to interpretation.

But you beat "this" by using the intuitive Occam's Razor, specifically the most intuitive and least abstract is correct. It's easier to refer to something that's not itself with "this", usually including context clues (hint hint), than it is to apply "this" without context clues.

point

your heads

We don't tag what something supposedly is going by text, we tag appearances. I'm not even sure why this is being questioned given the stupid number of tag wars we have over this very rule.

You can run into some eye of the beholder with tags like girly and crossdressing too..

This comic came to mind post #151733

By all visual accounts and chart traversals, Rio seems to be female. Tagged otherwise, though, and they talk about him being male in some of the pages. If taggers were totally technically accurate and stuck purely to non-text visual cues, it could be jarring for an unaware viewer.

I really don't feel like arguing the point, but maybe I'm a masochist because I'm going to anyway.

Let's say you have a picture of a dog holding a sewn animal in its mouth, you will recognize that as a stuffed animal. If there is a line coming from the toy, leading to the word "squeak", you will instead recognize the object as a squeaky toy, which is distinct.

If there is an image of someone being punched in the chest, that probably deserves a violence tag, maybe a few others. But if the image also contains a sound effect box with the word "CRACK!" written large and jagged, it's pretty obvious that there is a broken_bone there.

Saying that "words can lie" is kind of meaningless to me, because so can the image itself. A character has a flat chest and a distinctive bulge in their pants - you say that's a male? Well, how do you know it's not a female with a bound chest, packing a dildo in her trousers?

That is a real possibility, but we discount it because there is no evidence of it in the image. To me, this is analogous to the argument that says "well the words could be lying". Yeah. They could. And that earlier example could be a female pretending to be a male. But it seems to me that if we are discounting one of those possibilities, we ought to discount both. The words could be lies, but without any sort of evidence in the image that they are, it seems irrelevant.

The issue with the "this is not a pipe" image is that there is no choice between two possibilities there. It is clearly a pipe, and there is no evidence within the image to suggest that it could be something else besides a pipe. The text is not being served to clear up an ambiguity.

A better example would be an image of some article of clothing lying on the ground, but it's not clear which, but with a line of text underneath that says "this is a shirt".

As always, this comes down to "what would people be looking for when searching?".

I would argue that if someone is searching for, say, duo female -male sex, and they are given images with visually ambiguous characters who are clearly male by the dialogue present in the image, that is not what they are looking for, and the tagging system has failed this person.

Clawdragons said:
If there is an image of someone being punched in the chest, that probably deserves a violence tag, maybe a few others. But if the image also contains a sound effect box with the word "CRACK!" written large and jagged, it's pretty obvious that there is a broken_bone there.

What if the "crack" came from the attacker's knuckles cracking?

BlueDingo said:
What if the "crack" came from the attacker's knuckles cracking?

In that case, the sound effect would not be written, as I stated, "large and jagged".

This is not what someone would use to indicate popping knuckles.

notnobody said:
You can run into some eye of the beholder with tags like girly and crossdressing too..

This comic came to mind post #151733

By all visual accounts and chart traversals, Rio seems to be female. Tagged otherwise, though, and they talk about him being male in some of the pages. If taggers were totally technically accurate and stuck purely to non-text visual cues, it could be jarring for an unaware viewer.

That should be tagged as female.

Again, missing the point. We go by how a character appears in the image, not by how they're addressed. If it looks female, you tag it female.

Siral_Exan said:
Thank you for the word. For the life of me I couldn't remember it, so I went more specific.

BlueDingo said:
All names are TYWK as well.

(•_•) ... OK...

I just wanted to state that some sexual dimorphisms are used as a criterion to distinguish genders, when the refered are easily noticiable (deer, peacock, sea devil, rhinoceros beetle etc). However, how far this method should be used?

Ratte said:
That should be tagged as female.

Again, missing the point. We go by how a character appears in the image, not by how they're addressed. If it looks female, you tag it female.

I recognize that this was addressed to notnobody's specific point, not mine, but I just wanted to clarify my own point.

I am not suggesting by any means that an image which would normally be tagged "female" gets tagged "male" because of dialogue. Instead I am discussing images that would otherwise be tagged as ambiguous_gender.

Clawdragons said:
I recognize that this was addressed to notnobody's specific point, not mine, but I just wanted to clarify my own point.

I am not suggesting by any means that an image which would normally be tagged "female" gets tagged "male" because of dialogue. Instead I am discussing images that would otherwise be tagged as ambiguous_gender.

If it looks ambiguous, it's still ambiguous. The specific gender tags don't change how this works.

Ratte said:
If it looks ambiguous, it's still ambiguous. The specific gender tags don't change how this works.

And my point, as I've said before, is that I think that is detrimental to searching. Forcing it to remain as "ambiguous_gender" when there is evidence of the gender within the picture will end up preventing people from seeing the image who might want to, and may show the image to people trying to avoid such content.

It's not just a matter of ambiguous gender, but of any ambiguous situation - again, I refer you to my earlier example of broken bones (I.E., the extent and nature of the damage would otherwise be ambiguous). If I'm disturbed by broken bones, how does it make sense to allow broken bones through my blacklist because, as far as I can tell, "you'd only know there's a broken bone if you are literate"?

What benefit is there of doing it the way you describe? I can see plenty of detriments, but I don't see a benefit.

This isn't even an issue with TWYS vs TWYK. We're talking about elements which are part of the picture.

Clawdragons said:
And my point, as I've said before, is that I think that is detrimental to searching. Forcing it to remain as "ambiguous_gender" when there is evidence of the gender within the picture will end up preventing people from seeing the image who might want to, and may show the image to people trying to avoid such content.

It's not just a matter of ambiguous gender, but of any ambiguous situation - again, I refer you to my earlier example of broken bones (I.E., the extent and nature of the damage would otherwise be ambiguous). If I'm disturbed by broken bones, how does it make sense to allow broken bones through my blacklist because, as far as I can tell, "you'd only know there's a broken bone if you are literate"?

What benefit is there of doing it the way you describe? I can see plenty of detriments, but I don't see a benefit.

This isn't even an issue with TWYS vs TWYK. We're talking about elements which are part of the picture.

That's great but that is still how the rule is upheld. This is a matter of TWYS vs TWYK and we have numerous and counting examples of when text is not used to determine a tag, especially in the case of gender. This is no different and you're making the issue into something more convoluted than it really needs to be.

If referring to a very obviously female character as "he" doesn't mean they get the male tag, then likewise for referring to a very ambiguous character as anything but ambiguous_gender. These things simply do not determine the tag.

For your weirdly-specific example, there still needs to be some visual indication of the broken bone, such as an x-ray, a broken angle, etc. Just having the work "crack" somewhere with nothing to go with it is just text.

Ratte said:
That's great but that is still how the rule is upheld.

I understand that that's the rule.

I'm saying that the rule impedes searching and finding relevant art. That is to say, it is a bad rule.

It's also somewhat inconsistent, since we have tags like dirty_talk, but since inconsistency isn't really that big of a deal in reality, that's not really too important.

This is a matter of TWYS vs TWYK

You say that, but I fail to see how. Until now, the "see" is "tag what you see" has never been literal - "tag what you see" has always been used to say "tag what exists in the image, as opposed to outside information". Dialogue in an image is not outside information, and requires no outside knowledge - outside of basic literacy - to understand or tag.

Literally the only way I can see this being an issue of TWYS vs TWYK is if basic literacy is considered outside information. Which I think can be fairly discounted as a policy considering being able to write and read tags requires at least some level of literacy.

As I said before, honestly, discounting the dialogue in an image seems to me to be closer to TWYK than anything.

But, you know, like I said, I didn't really want to get into this conversation to begin with, because I was pretty sure it would go nowhere. So I am going to drop it.

However, I'm not retracting my complaint that this rule seems like a violation of TWYS and furthermore, seems to be bad for users, bad for searching, and bad for blacklisting.

It is an old holdover from the time when boobs were not tagged unless they were naked or in skintight clothing.

I have to agree with Clawdragons here. As I've said before I think we should be a little flexible with the rules. Text gives insight of what is going on in a image. Some tags are almost dependant on it, such as wrong_hole. Gender can be a difficult subject so we should probably look at individual cases. The ambiguous gender tag could be useful.

implied_male implied_female
?

Ok, I know there has been this thousand-year battle over where twyk should/has to be used to produce the best search results, and the only possible resolution I've ever heard was an old post from NMNY:

NotMeNotYou said:
My personally favorite solution for the TWYS and TWYK debate would be a complete overhaul of the tagging database, and the introduction of a new, unrelated tag database.

The main database would be the TWYS one and stays exactly the same as it currently is, the new database would be for TWYK tags and compliments the main DB.

Which is not technically feasible at the moment.

However... if/when this ever gets implemented, would it not be better to start building up a useable chunk of tag data NOW, (which could later be split to begin forming its own twyk database) instead of waiting and having 100k posts to hunt down and update all at once?

Ijerk said:
implied_male implied_female
?

Ok, I know there has been this thousand-year battle over where twyk should/has to be used to produce the best search results, and the only possible resolution I've ever heard was an old post from NMNY:

Which is not technically feasible at the moment.

However... if/when this ever gets implemented, would it not be better to start building up a useable chunk of tag data NOW, (which could later be split to begin forming its own twyk database) instead of waiting and having 100k posts to hunt down and update all at once?

You're ten times too short on that number. There's a million posts, not a hundred thousand.

Clawdragons said:
And my point, as I've said before, is that I think that is detrimental to searching. Forcing it to remain as "ambiguous_gender" when there is evidence of the gender within the picture will end up preventing people from seeing the image who might want to, and may show the image to people trying to avoid such content.

It's not just a matter of ambiguous gender, but of any ambiguous situation - again, I refer you to my earlier example of broken bones (I.E., the extent and nature of the damage would otherwise be ambiguous). If I'm disturbed by broken bones, how does it make sense to allow broken bones through my blacklist because, as far as I can tell, "you'd only know there's a broken bone if you are literate"?

We tag art, not text. All tags¹ are used to describe something directly visible in the image. If a character looks ambiguous they get tagged as such, if a broken bone is visible, we tag that broken bone, if a penis is visible, we tag the penis. Text in the image does not change what is visible in the image, it can only expand on what is visible in the image, but we ignore this expansion of the information in the image itself.

¹ - The tags that are an exception are only used for this particular exception, and don't have overlap into tags that are used to describe actually visible content in the image

I hate the way this rule works for more than a few reasons.

One of the problems with gender is that you can't always assume based on appearance. Take long hair, for instance. Many men might have long hair, but that's one feature that's been assumed a woman's trait for many years. Having earrings is another.

Furrin_Gok said:
You're ten times too short on that number. There's a million posts, not a hundred thousand.

I know. There's only around 60k currently tagged ambiguous, though. Plus maybe 10-20k with no gender listed. I'm assuming the vast majority of posts are well-defined enough that they'll never have to be scrutinized... hopefully.

PheagleAdler said:
I hate the way this rule works for more than a few reasons.

One of the problems with gender is that you can't always assume based on appearance. Take long hair, for instance. Many men might have long hair, but that's one feature that's been assumed a woman's trait for many years. Having earrings is another.

the gender tags are not really gender tags here. they are "what set of physical traits this character appears to have in this specific image" tags

PheagleAdler said:
I hate the way this rule works for more than a few reasons.

One of the problems with gender is that you can't always assume based on appearance. Take long hair, for instance. Many men might have long hair, but that's one feature that's been assumed a woman's trait for many years. Having earrings is another.

Long hair is not very high on the flowchart, if it's there at all.

Speaking of long hair, if not for the pant bulge I wouldn't think this included a guy.
post #985975