In accordance to its wiki, this tag needs a major cleanup. This contains thousands of mistags, and I'm wondering if this is even worth the trouble.

I have two solutions:

A) Alias the tag to invalid_tag.
Reason: This tag is subjective, which means that mistags are not going to stop. From just looking at the first two pages, I can already see that this needs a lot of work put into this. Instead of maintaining this tag, let's just take the easy way out and get rid of it.

B) Manually fix the mistags
Reason: This tag still has a purpose and users want to find the content this tag provides. Even though it might take a while to fix the thousands of mistags manually and we have to maintain it afterwards, this is still a good tag.

What should we do?

EDIT: The tag alias couple -> couple_(disambiguation) (forum #228396) has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.

From my understanding, romantic_couple is basically romantic duo with the possibility of other characters being present. I don't tag it myself because I'm not that good at determining what is and isn't romantic.

If you go with invalid_tag, romantic will need to be looked at as well.

+1 for invalidate, and I provide a second reason: people have ignored any context the image may provide and tag based on the lore (AKA, TWYK). This is especially true in cases where the artist/commissioner themselves upload the image...

Sort of +1 option A, although I do get the value of something along those lines. Tags where subjective opinion defines whether they fit the wiki are the worst to begin with, but it's an extra level of awful when the wiki is written as a subjective definition to begin with. If anybody's actually willing to put in the effort, it might be best to pick just one of the tags from that sphere (e.g. romantic, love, etc), fix the obvious mistags where possible, and alias them all to one destination. It seems worth giving people a tool to find that sort of thing we could agree is actually a thing, but it definitely doesn't seem clear enough to have a whole bunch of amorphous tags all vaguely pointing in the same general direction.

BlueDingo said:
From my understanding, romantic_couple is basically romantic duo with the possibility of other characters being present. I don't tag it myself because I'm not that good at determining what is and isn't romantic.

If you go with invalid_tag, romantic will need to be looked at as well.

Romantic couple is an "aww, how cute" moment between a couple. Think of 2 children doing an Eskimo kiss (this is the lesser end, mind you).

Romantic is just a setting for romance, for instance a candle-lit room with this in the background.

Romantic, therefore, can be seen a bit more easily.

I'd imagine that the majority of mistags under romantic_couple stem from the fact couple is aliased to it, which people very often tag when they should really be tagging duo instead.

Aliasing couple to couple_(disambiguation) instead would make it easier to prevent mistags, and can be allocated to romantic_couple or duo.

+1 for B. This tag really would be useful if cleaned up, but of course, we will need to find out what exactly is causing all those mistags, their number seems too high to be caused by a mere subjectivity.

Johannes said:
I'd imagine that the majority of mistags under romantic_couple stem from the fact couple is aliased to it, which people very often tag when they should really be tagging duo instead.

Aliasing couple to couple_(disambiguation) instead would make it easier to prevent mistags, and can be allocated to romantic_couple or duo.

Yeah, this alias possibly is part of the problem.

Birthday_Rat_Siral said:with this in the background.

I'm mildly disturbed that I knew exactly what that was about to be before I even moused over the link...

I think trying to use romantic to describe something that doesn't even have to do with any characters is a measure of subjectivity it's not worth keeping. Seems like it would be better to just conglomerate everything that makes any sense into some umbrella emotional term.

notnobody said:
I'm mildly disturbed that I knew exactly what that was about to be before I even moused over the link...

I think trying to use romantic to describe something that doesn't even have to do with any characters is a measure of subjectivity it's not worth keeping. Seems like it would be better to just conglomerate everything that makes any sense into some umbrella emotional term.

I think it should be more specific. I don't see mistags with romantic replaced by romantic_couple, and I see both at times, so maybe romantic_setting, romantic_background (since characters are on the "front ground"), or romantic_imagery (which is a bit more vague).

I can explain more later, typing in class AWS.

I hope we're able to keep the tag. There's really no better way to describe stuff like post #984035.

Yeah, we've spent so much time cleaning it that I'd almost be for invalidation at this point. But as usual, most of the recent mistags are from a single user.

How about just unaliasing and invalidating couple, since that'd take care of most of the mistags?

Birthday_Rat_Siral said:
I think it should be more specific.

There's already romantic_ambiance for settings, which is very hard for anyone to mistag.

I'd +1 anything besides axing it completely. It is a useful tag that just needs to be refined a little.

It'll never cease to amaze me how e6 admins are capable of demanding some sort of strict criteria in situations when the only sane and rational solution would be soft guidelines and "use your best fucking judgement".

TheHuskyK9 said:
This tag is subjective, which means that mistags are not going to stop.

Pretty much all tags on this site are subjective, except maybe for monochrome and white_background, and i'm not ever sure about those. People will always mistag stuffs for subjective reasons, right until tagging AIs will replace them. Then it's just gonna be NN-guided random tagging everywhere.

What exactly is wrong with romantic_couple right now? Not "in accordance to the wiki", I mean, in regular human language. Is it overtagged on explicit images?

-1 to A.
0 to B, it's useful for searches and probably rare in blacklists

hslugs said:
What exactly is wrong with romantic_couple right now? Not "in accordance to the wiki", I mean, in regular human language. Is it overtagged on explicit images?

It's often tagged for any generic duos, who sometimes aren't even interacting.

These had the tag:
post #1097870 post #1041631 post #1041634 post #1097849

But as I said, that's because some users think that couple simply means 'two characters' (either that, or they tag it by outside information), and it's currently aliased to romantic_couple.

Genjar said:
But as I said, that's because some users think that couple simply means 'two characters' (-), and it's currently aliased to romantic_couple.

So that's what should be fixed then. Un-alias couple -> romantic_couple, possibly alias couple -> couple_(disambiguation), and wait for everything to get re-tagged. The price of hasty aliasing.

One more case for rejecting A. That alias would be irreversible as well.

Also [blacklisted][blacklisted][blacklisted][blacklisted] lol.

I'm in the opinion of de-aliasing couple from romantic_couple. This is one of those cases were it sounds good in theory but executes poorly. Found the source

hslugs said:
It'll never cease to amaze me how e6 admins are capable of demanding some sort of strict criteria in situations when the only sane and rational solution would be soft guidelines and "use your best fucking judgement".

???

Yeah, this is getting disambiguated.

If romantic_couple gets cleaned soon, I'll check back in a few months to see what the damage is. If it's still being misused, we'll invalidate it.

Removed:

• couple -> romantic_couple

• lovers -> romantic_couple

Added:

• couple -> `couple_(disambiguation)`

• lovers -> couple_(disambiguation)

Pending:

• `mates` -> couple_(disambiguation) (as suggested in forum #212666)

Also if anybody would like to do the bitchwork and create the wiki page for `couple_(disambiguation)`, that would be awesome.

Knotty_Curls said:

Yeah, this is getting disambiguated.

If romantic_couple gets cleaned soon, I'll check back in a few months to see what the damage is. If it's still being misused, we'll invalidate it.

Removed:

• couple -> romantic_couple

• lovers -> romantic_couple

Added:

• couple -> `couple_(disambiguation)`

• lovers -> couple_(disambiguation)

Pending:

• `mates` -> couple_(disambiguation) (as suggested in forum #212666)

Also if anybody would like to do the bitchwork and create the wiki page for `couple_(disambiguation)`, that would be awesome.

Done.

Note: I don't know if 'lovers' should have been un-aliased too, since 'couple' was the problematic one.

So what is it the couple tag/s is/are supposed to actually represent exactly? This is a couple as in two characters in a relationship? How do you represent that? Sex is sex, and smiling, talking, cuddling, etc can as easily be chalked up to general friendly interactions as some sort of going-steady type thing. Something like leomole showed, I see eye_contact, smile, <3, and maybe cuddling should be added. That's all there, and that's all you really see, until we start delving into the oft-fraught discussions about inferring things.

I'm interested in whether there's anything any of these tags provide that's beyond what just all of their constituent parts are. Like, what's the real crux of the gestalt we're trying to capture? If it's just how you feel when you look at it, that's the absolute definition of subjective, and it's why a totally valid tag for one person could make no sense at all to another.

The tag alias couple -> couple_(disambiguation) (forum #228396) has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.