Princess_Celestia said:
I will hit you with many heavy things.

(◕ω◕)

Ten ton safe!

Gilda_The_Gryphon said:
How about not breaking search for others by removing pegging from post #335304, or male from post #334732 (female tag though... I would tag it gay. ) From my point of view you really want too hard to find ambiguous_gender where it isn't.

Pegging is female with strap-on with a male.
Character on the bottom of that pic really doesn't look male, at all.
Hence, I removed the pegging tag, which I stand by.
But don't care anymore since apparently using my best judgement will just end up getting me in trouble.

Hammie said:
Pegging is female with strap-on with a male.
Character on the bottom of that pic really doesn't look male, at all.
Hence, I removed the pegging tag, which I stand by.
But don't care anymore since apparently using my best judgement will just end up getting me in trouble.

Actually, I agree with you. We can't tell if "it" is male or female because we can't see the characteristics of that character in the image. Also, the wiki for pegging says it's very gender specific, and the image is ambiguous_gender so the "pegging" tag should not be tagged on that image.

Hammie said:
Well, I'm done.
I'm getting PM'd by an admin now telling me to stop.
Not even sure what the guidelines are supposed to be anymore.

Yeah, welcome to the club.
I got told off for something that I was certain about. If you can't trust your own judgement, what else can you trust? So I chose to stop tagging altogether, rather than get in trouble.

Hammie said:
Well, I'm done.
I'm getting PM'd by an admin now telling me to stop.
Not even sure what the guidelines are supposed to be anymore.

Done with the arguing, done with trying to help tag accurately.
I'll be leaving it to everyone else now.

Enjoy.

Genjar said:
Yeah, welcome to the club.
I got told off for something that I was certain about. If you can't trust your own judgement, what else can you trust? So I chose to stop tagging altogether, rather than get in trouble.

Welcome to what happens when you care too much. And that's not just you, that's for a lot of e621 users I've seen. We all have the same end goal of trying to make sure e621 has the most thorough and useful tagging system of any furry site, but people disagree about the best way to do that.

What a shame to lose the support of certain users entirely all because an agreement can't be reached over how to tag a very small percentage of posts. Unfortunately, and what many seem to fail to understand, is that agreements won't always be reached, and sometimes you're simply going to find yourself on the "wrong" side of a debate.

"Well if you're saying I'm wrong, then I'm just not going to help at all anymore!" is something I've seen more than once on this site, and almost always over a trivial issue that affects hardly anything.

What the administration says is "Guys, we're doing our best", yet what users seem to want is perfection; perfect rules, perfect guides, perfect standards that are going to make tagging every picture simple and logical, so that only people who "don't understand" are the only ones who would get tagging wrong. This is an ideal, a utopia that you're never ever going to see here. To throw up your arms and say "FUCK IT!" and refuse to help at all anymore just because the administration hasn't been able to create a system where everything is black-and-white is... a little short sighted, in my opinion.

People disagreed with you. It's not the end of the world. There's SO MUCH CONTENT here that needs your attention that IS easily and logically handled. Yet you're saying that you're going to give up entirely, because you were unable to convince a few other people on the site that your way of tagging furry art is better than their way?

Why give up entirely, thereby depriving the site of a valuable user that really cares about tags, and let those with worse tagging habits have more ground? Why not just let one particular issue go, instead of letting everything go?

I don't get it.

It's not about perfection, Char: It's about consistency. Nobody thinks any set of rules is ever perfect and we all bend them now and then when we don't agree with them, but when the set of rules we're trying to go boy is about as stable as a Jenga game, it just feels absurd.

Foobaria said:
It's not about perfection, Char: It's about consistency. Nobody thinks any set of rules is ever perfect and we all bend them now and then when we don't agree with them, but when the set of rules we're trying to go boy is about as stable as a Jenga game, it just feels absurd.

Again, because no matter what "concrete" rules are laid down, there will always be exceptions, there will always be situations that just don't want to work right with the rules and practices in place. And then when people point it out and we go one way instead of another, threads like this are what happens.

No Char, it's not the disagreements, or being wrong.
It's being threatened with punishment by users, and admins when I'm just trying to help.

I can stand being on the wrong side of an argument.
But when the argument didn't really get resolved all that well, and then an admin comes in and tells me to stop because I was the wrong one, even though they never actually said so in the thread.

Yeah that's something I don't want to deal with.

The only reason you were probably threatened was because you wouldn't listen to anyone. I would say something more... But I rather just let it die.

Falord said:
The only reason you were probably threatened was because you wouldn't listen to anyone. I would say something more... But I rather just let it die.

No, I was threatened because, and I quote:

Rainbow_Dash said:
facial structure determines the gender if it has no other gender traits

Which is odd, because as I recall Char refused to say that facial structure was the guideline to follow:

Char said:
...
Again, you're looking for definitive guidelines and I'm telling you that that's not going to be possible. If I say "sure, use muzzle shape", then at some point down the line THAT will cause a conflict too.

Now if I'm wrong about a particular image because the face looks particularly feminine, or masculine than that's one thing.
But I was told to stop re-tagging MLP genders altogether, which implies that facial structure is the be-all end-all gender identifier if you're lacking genitals.
Which it isn't.
According to Char anyway.
Which is what I was attempting to follow.

Char said:
what users seem to want is perfection; perfect rules, perfect guides, perfect standards that are going to make tagging every picture simple and logical, so that only people who "don't understand" are the only ones who would get tagging wrong.

As someone who doesn't participate a lot, this was something that always kind of struck me as odd. Given the 90-9-1 rule I would have thought that a goal of any tagging system would be to make it work well for people who just come to lurk and see furry pictures. They don't ever come to the forums, and are blissfully unaware of TWYS and all the other drama surrounding strict tagging rules.

I think this is unfortunate, because it degrades the usefulness of the site for these (the majority) users. Compare this to tagging that is opportunistic and eager. That is, the mantra that images having more tags is better than having fewer. Even if there's a pegging tag on a picture with a somewhat ambiguously gendered character, that's okay because someone who thinks it might not be pegging can skip over it, and someone who thinks it is will be able to find it.

Hammie said:
Now if I'm wrong about a particular image because the face looks particularly feminine, or masculine than that's one thing.
But I was told to stop re-tagging MLP genders altogether, which implies that facial structure is the be-all end-all gender identifier if you're lacking genitals.
Which it isn't.
According to Char anyway.
Which is what I was attempting to follow.

It doesn't help anything that LOTS of furry and furry-styled art contains male characters that are somewhat to highly feminized in the face and body. This makes saying for certain whether something is male or female when you can't see the "key areas" tough sometimes. And even then, who knows if you're just not seeing the vagina behind the balls. It's furry art, all bets are off.

And that goes back to what I said above. Being overly inclusive will help more people find more pictures that tend to fit what they're looking for. Being overly restrictive will exclude a lot of pictures for the average user just because Bob thinks he's looking for a boy fox and Alice thinks she's looking for a girl fox and neither of them find the picture because ProTagger3000 insists it is a dickgirl.

Wearing such restrictive blinders also leads to confusing inconsistencies, such as post #335235. Why should a picture with a single character be tagged both princess_celestia_(mlp) and ambiguous_gender? This borders on illogical.

The problem is that the tag ambiguous_gender does not actually yield any information. It actually indicates a lack of information. But then we may as well have ambiguous_number_of_tails for any character that we cannot see a tail for. And we should have ambiguous_teeth for characters with their mouths closed. And so on. Tagging an image with what you don't know is meaningless because the list of possible tags is unbounded.

The other problem is that it completely ignores the implicit relationships that exist between tags (the ones that transcend e6 aliases). For example, barring concrete evidence to the contrary, there is an implicit relationship between princess_celestia_(mlp) and female. Sure, if in a particular picture Celestia is visibly packing a giant noodle between her legs then reach into your bag of tags and try to find the best fit for that given picture. But if that evidence is not present I don't think the implicit relationship should be destroyed.

But because that implicit knowledge has been lost, if someone searches for my_little_pony female, they will not find post #335235 or post #330190 or post #324530, and that's too bad because those are some pretty great pictures.

tl;dr: I think more tags > fewer for most users, and tagging unknown information is unwise and unhelpful because that list is infinitely large.

post #335235 is tagged ambiguous_gender because it is.
Wanting to tag it as female because the character is supposed to be doesn't work.

You're assuming that someone who is looking for that image is looking for MLP material.

What if I had a fetish for female feral horses?
Would I want that image included in my search?
No.

Being restrictive means that you can find the images you are looking for more easily.

Why would I want 5000 images returning in my search if only maybe 200 were what I wanted.

Hammie said:
post #335235 is tagged ambiguous_gender because it is.
Wanting to tag it as female because the character is supposed to be doesn't work.

You're assuming that someone who is looking for that image is looking for MLP material.

But Hammie, if one is looking for MLP material, then, yes, they would want to see it.

Renard_Queenston said:
But Hammie, if one is looking for MLP material, then, yes, they would want to see it.

If all they want is any MLP then they can just search MLP.
If you're just searching MLP + Female then I would assume you're looking for something female looking.
If you're looking for princess celestia, then you search for that.

DrNick said:
But because that implicit knowledge has been lost, if someone searches for my_little_pony female, they will not find post #335235 or post #330190 or post #324530, and that's too bad because those are some pretty great pictures.

I really don't see why someone couldn't just search mlp ~female ~ambiguous_gender if xe want to search something that is for sure female, and something that can be female.
I only have problem with overusing ambiguous_gender tags in explicit pictures when it collides with other tags like pegging.

mlp gender tagging:
I generally would let issue go, but I really don't want "muzzle shape" to become a guideline/rule, because it's stupid fandom guess, and can change at any time. I would rather expand current change of TWYS rules only to tagging ambiguous_genders than this "rule".

Just a slight side note, post #324530 is tagged female as well as ambiguous(random background ponies are ambiguous).
So if you searched "MLP female" it would show up.

Char said:
Why give up entirely, thereby depriving the site of a valuable user that really cares about tags, and let those with worse tagging habits have more ground? Why not just let one particular issue go, instead of letting everything go?

I don't get it.

I tried my best to follow the tagging guidelines, but still got told off for it. So what am I supposed to do? I can't trust my own judgment and I can't trust the guidelines, since evidently what I see is not always what everyone sees.

It's better to stop tagging than to make more messes for others to clean up. And to be honest, I don't really feel like doing volunteer work if it gets me banned.

Genjar said:
I tried my best to follow the tagging guidelines, but still got told off for it. So what am I supposed to do? I can't trust my own judgment and I can't trust the guidelines, since evidently what I see is not always what everyone sees.

It's better to stop tagging than to make more messes for others to clean up. And to be honest, I don't really feel like doing volunteer work if it gets me banned.

How about leaving subjective issues to sort out and do other things? Like replacing color tags. I don't see how can you be banned for this. When I got smacked for tagging anthro tags according to the wiki I just left it for some time.

Or maybe try to not retag pictures which were already changed by someone else - avoid tag warring? One of my tagging projects is to tag feral to non-anthro ponies, and I very rarely tag it to pictures that already have anthro* tags on them. Even though I think it might deserve it. There are many more pictures that needs tagging to lose time on controversial ones.

Genjar said:
I tried my best to follow the tagging guidelines, but still got told off for it. So what am I supposed to do? I can't trust my own judgment and I can't trust the guidelines, since evidently what I see is not always what everyone sees.

It's better to stop tagging than to make more messes for others to clean up. And to be honest, I don't really feel like doing volunteer work if it gets me banned.

You don't even have any records on your account from what I see, so I can only assume that what you received was a PM from an admin (and who very well may have been one of the few admins that didn't really work out). If you felt that the admin was in the wrong, then you could have asked me to look into it. If you were confused, you could have asked for further clarification.

Getting corrected by admins is, sometimes, how you learn how to tag on e621, especially once you start getting into the tags that are often the cause of debate. e621 tries to make tags as 'useful' as possible, rather than as 'accurate' as possible. Example: the "gay" tag applies only to images that contain homosexual activity between males, rather than trying to describe the apparent sexual orientation of a single male. That is one thing that users often don't immediately understand, but the tag is used the way that it's used for a very specific reason that may not be immediately obvious.

Admins will (or should) only get on your case if you're consistently doing something the wrong way, despite being corrected (this is what neutral records on accounts are for). If they see that you're still doing something wrong, despite seeing the neutral record where they or another admin has already corrected you before, THEN you start risking being banned.

If you ever got banned for simply not understanding a tagging rule (rather than wilfully breaking it), I'd very likely undo it immediately and have a few words with the admin that was so quick to pass judgment.

Gilda, some people aren't satisfied with "Why not do some good instead of no good at all?". Some people can't be content with half-assing a job intentionally just to avoid conflict due to flaws in the job itself.

Foobaria said:
Gilda, some people aren't satisfied with "Why not do some good instead of no good at all?". Some people can't be content with half-assing a job intentionally just to avoid conflict due to flaws in the job itself.

Again, it is not going to be possible for e621's system of tagging to ever be flawless. This is exactly what I was talking about a few posts ago, how people want e621 to have a perfect system that they can just lock into and completely understand front to back, never causing any problems, always being in the right because they're just doing what the system mandates.

Please enlighten us on what flaws need to be fixed. Yes, I'm sure you've mentioned them before, but I'd really be interested in hearing what issues need to be fixed, and then everyone can try to figure out how easy or hard it would be to fix any of them. (Yes I could list many issues myself, but I want to know what's on your mind in particular).

Consistency.

Decide whether FA sources should link to the direct image, the submission page, or the artist's gallery, and make it a rule, so nobody can get yelled at for changing it. And enforce it, even with mods/admins.

Decide whether muzzle shape, longer eyelashes, etc. (specific inarguable features) determine gender or not, and make it a rule, so nobody can get yelled at for changing it. There are many specific properties you can list as "if it has X, it is Y" without even dipping into subjectivity.

Decide whether anthro should or should not be tagged when no non-anthro is present, and make it a rule, so nobody can get yelled at for changing it.

Do you see the theme here? Forget the wiki, forget the forum, forget the comments, forget all of that: MAKE RULES. Pick objective and inarguable elements of images (like penises, eyelashes, etc.), decide what they mean, state a rule on a page or in a sticky (not the wiki, which is basically just a helpfile), and enforce it.

There will always be subjectivity, yes, and I'm kind of weary of seeing you dismiss the attitude of those of us who have given up tagging by saying "it will never be flawless" as if quality is a binary condition between "perfect" and "shit".

People want things they can point to and say "That right there says I'm right, and you can't say I'm wrong.". They will never have that for everything, but give them that for SOME things. Give us some hard-and-fast things we can do that we can't be yelled at for, even by admins.

Foobaria said:
Consistency.

Decide whether FA sources should link to the direct image, the submission page, or the artist's gallery, and make it a rule, so nobody can get yelled at for changing it. And enforce it, even with mods/admins.

It should link to the artist's gallery. FA submission pages get deleted and do not leave behind any information at all about who the uploader was, therefore they're not a reliable source to link to. Are there admins that are saying otherwise?

Foobaria said:
Decide whether muzzle shape, longer eyelashes, etc. (specific inarguable features) determine gender or not, and make it a rule, so nobody can get yelled at for changing it. There are many specific properties you can list as "if it has X, it is Y" without even dipping into subjectivity.

These are COMPLETELY STYLE-DEPENDENT features, which is why the administration is reluctant to say anything about it. If we say muzzle shape indicates something, then it's just going to be thrown right back in our faces when it turns out that this new guideline/rule completely doesn't work for a particular artist's style. All we can do is tell you that certain features MAY indicate a certain gender, but it would be completely foolish to say that certain features will always PROVE certain genders, aside from the genetalia itself.

Muzzle shape and longer eyelashes determine gender for characters in SOME artwork, but not ALL artwork. To make it as accurate as possible, we'd have to add another rule that says something along the lines of "If the artist's style usually depicts X gender as having trait Y, then assume that X gender is true if you ever see trait Y in that particular artist's style". It just doesn't work.

Foobaria said:
Decide whether anthro should or should not be tagged when no non-anthro is present, and make it a rule, so nobody can get yelled at for changing it.

The wiki page for the anthro tag already states that the tag should not be applied unless there is a non-anthro in the post too. I don't agree with this myself, honestly, and I do think that should be changed, but I'm not really sure what logic went into enacting such a rule in the first place.

But that's what the wiki page says and that's what should be followed unless the administration agrees that it should be changed. The rule is right there, follow it. If you don't like it, suggest changing it and present your reasoning.

Foobaria said:
Do you see the theme here? Forget the wiki, forget the forum, forget the comments, forget all of that: MAKE RULES. Pick objective and inarguable elements of images (like penises, eyelashes, etc.), decide what they mean, state a rule on a page or in a sticky (not the wiki, which is basically just a helpfile), and enforce it.

Alright, go for it. Make some rules for us right now, and we can put them to the test. Honestly, I'm being serious. I really want to know what you would do if you were the person making and enforcing policies on e621, and I want to see how well they'd work.

Foobaria said:
There will always be subjectivity, yes, and I'm kind of weary of seeing you dismiss the attitude of those of us who have given up tagging by saying "it will never be flawless" as if quality is a binary condition between "perfect" and "shit".

You're asking the administration to make rules/statements that they KNOW would lead to further problems. I've already explained the muzzle shape thing in this very thread, and how silly it would be to try to apply a policy like that to all artwork on the site, but you're still insisting that we come up with a concrete answers of "yes it determines gender" or "no it does not determine gender". The answer is that yes, sometimes it can determine gender, and no, sometimes it doesn't. This is why the guideline is more a generic "do they LOOK female" rather than a specific "do they contain these specific traits of females". No, not everyone will be able to agree that a certain character looks female, even admins. But I'd rather have some ambiguity than specific rules that are undoubtedly going to be wrong in cases that I can even think of off the top of my head.

Foobaria said:
People want things they can point to and say "That right there says I'm right, and you can't say I'm wrong.". They will never have that for everything, but give them that for SOME things. Give us some hard-and-fast things we can do that we can't be yelled at for, even by admins.

And then the rule gets challenged. "Well the rule says this, but that's obviously completely incorrect for these images here, so the rule needs to either be changed or removed entirely". This cycle would never end, until the rules became so incredibly complex and long-winded that people just wouldn't even try anymore.

Believe me, it'd be so easy to wipe out almost all of this pony-gender-tagging debate by just saying "Alright, if they're popular cartoon characters, tag them according to their stated gender in the show unless it's obvious that that's not the case. If they're personal furry characters, tag them according to how they look." Done. Except that would be another exception to our "concrete" TWYS rule, and there were quite a few people who expressed how upset they were about the last change to TWYS that was made.

Again, I've answered as best as I can, but I'd love to hear your own solutions to the questions/problems you bring up.

Char said:
It should link to the artist's gallery. FA submission pages get deleted and do not leave behind any information at all about who the uploader was, therefore they're not a reliable source to link to. Are there admins that are saying otherwise?

This says otherwise. And isn't it better to add artist gallery link in wiki instead, and have source with submission page? Searching through FA galleries isn't fun, and I have no idea how to use tags there.

Gilda_The_Gryphon said:
This says otherwise. And isn't it better to add artist gallery link in wiki instead, and have source with submission page? Searching through FA galleries isn't fun, and I have no idea how to use tags there.

I stand corrected then, I was under the impression that this wasn't actually documented anywhere since Foobaria seemed to be indicating that it wasn't.

While yes, it makes sense to link to the submission on the external site itself, it only makes sense if the artist's wiki page contains the link to their gallery. This also runs into a bit of a usability problem on e621; that is, it's not very obvious to anyone at all that artists even HAVE wiki pages on e621 unless they click that little ? beside the artist's name. If they see "source" on the post page itself, what reason do they have to think that additional links to the artist's galleries are contained elsewhere? They may try the source link, see that it's dead, and think that that's all they can do. The site really needs to be hinting somehow that additional information about the artist can be found elsewhere, or even automatically present that information on each post page itself.

Char said:
...
These are COMPLETELY STYLE-DEPENDENT features, which is why the administration is reluctant to say anything about it. If we say muzzle shape indicates something, then it's just going to be thrown right back in our faces when it turns out that this new guideline/rule completely doesn't work for a particular artist's style. All we can do is tell you that certain features MAY indicate a certain gender, but it would be completely foolish to say that certain features will always PROVE certain genders, aside from the genetalia itself.

Muzzle shape and longer eyelashes determine gender for characters in SOME artwork, but not ALL artwork. To make it as accurate as possible, we'd have to add another rule that says something along the lines of "If the artist's style usually depicts X gender as having trait Y, then assume that X gender is true if you ever see trait Y in that particular artist's style". It just doesn't work.
...

You should probably have a chat with Rainbow_Dash.
PM discussion of muzzle shape/gender issue:

Hammie said:
Sorry, re-read Char's post on the issue, and no.
He specifically refused to say that was the case to prevent future arguments.
Like this one.

I'm still not tagging them any further because I don't feel like dealing with the crap I take for trying to help out.

Rainbow_Dash said:
Well I've changed it to that standard since then and will be up-keeping the use of it

Hammie said:
You should probably have a chat with Rainbow_Dash.
PM discussion of muzzle shape/gender issue:

I'm no longer the lead admin of this site, so I no longer answer for what the administrators are doing now.

I don't know why Rainbow_Dash would have told you that, all I can figure is he felt that it'd be ok to do so since I've resigned and there's currently no one to make a final say on such issues.

Char said:
I'm no longer the lead admin of this site, so I no longer answer for what the administrators are doing now.

I don't know why Rainbow_Dash would have told you that, all I can figure is he felt that it'd be ok to do so since I've resigned and there's currently no one to make a final say on such issues.

Fair enough, I was hoping more for an agreement among admins as to how this should be handled than you just laying the smack down.

I think that's one of the biggest issues I've run into, particularly with tagging issues like this.
Lack of consistency from one admin to the next as far as how things are/should be handled.
I'm not saying there's a perfect system out there, or that admins should always agree with each other on everything.
That would be silly.
But some sort of consensus would make life easier for the average user, so we don't have to look over our shoulders hoping that admin B won't punish us for what admin A said was the way to do things.

Char said:
If you felt that the admin was in the wrong, then you could have asked me to look into it. If you were confused, you could have asked for further clarification.

I really didn't want to bother you over such a minor matter. Especially since you've, er, retired and should be spending time sipping pina coladas on some tropic island, instead of listening to users getting butthurt over tagging.

It doesn't have much to do with MLP anyway, so this is the wrong topic for it. I guess I can summarize the whole thing in a PM; will try to keep it as short as possible.