So! Uploaded a zodiac themed post the other day and discovered that the related tags are a bit of a mess.

So, for a primer: There are many types of zodiac, but the ones most commonly drawn and known about are the western zodiac and the eastern zodiac, each of which has a number of signs associated with it.

Western zodiac is aquarius, scorpio, leo, gemini, etc.
Eastern is the 'year of the tiger,' 'year of the rooster.'

Now, for the site..

we have wikipages (sort of... they all just link to each other and have no text) for:

• chinese_zodiac - 35 posts - Seems to be mostly appropriately themed posts.

modern_zodiac - 14 posts - likewise.
zodiac_(astrology) - 10 posts - ...? This seems to not have any unique identity, as I'd tag everything in here with one of the other two.

Okay, for starters... there's obviously an extra tag in there. Unless the point of it is to to be an umbrella tag...? (on the other had, zodiac is an artist tag that's currently a mess of assorted zodiac-related posts, that would work just fine.

Secondly, modern zodiac is... kinda insulting. It's a little passively racist, because the chinese's still around and kicking... and the 'modern zodiac' has been around for around 3000 years :P So, um.. no.

Further, the Chinese zodiac is used in multiple East Asian countries, not just China.

So..

1. chinese_zodiac aliases to eastern_zodiac

2. Clean up the tags, ending up with eastern_zodiac and western_zodiac

3. Clean up zodiac.

3a. ...If zodiac is an emptied tag, then... potentially:

• eastern_zodiac implies zodiac

western_zodiac implies zodiac

Okay, with that...

We currently have a lot of tags like Gemini_(zodiac)... and I think it's good to have those.. just.. we're not the most consistant. :)

Let me collect the various tag-styles we have right now... I'm gonna use 'scorpio' for all of them, even though they're in a wide variety of tags. :)

• scorpio

scorpio_(astrology)
scorpio_symbol
scorpio_(symbol)
scorpio_(zodiac)
scorpio_(zodiac_sign)

I think that's all of them.

Now, plain 'scorpio' is no good, because there are some characters named stuff like Scorpio. Unfortunatly.

The *_symbol tags refer to the actual symbols used to represent the sign.. post #10608 Like is floating in the little orb there.

Hmm.. I'm running out of time, so making this fast:

I think we should use:

• scorpio_(symbol)

scorpio_(zodiac) or scorpio_(zodiac_sign)

More inclined to 'zodiac' because the sign could be understood as the symbol.. . also, shorter.

From there:

• scorpio_(zodiac) implies western zodiac

...as for the eastern zodiac.. maybe something like tiger_(zodiac), dragon_(zodiac)?

I'll put together a full list of things that need to be implied/aliased to make copy pasting easier (not that there's much!)

Anyway, I just wanted to put the idea out there since it LOOKS like someone started to do this, then maybe got distracted or something.

(as always, I have no problems doing the work! I just don't want to make 'large' changes without running it by people :) It's mostly gonna be lots of tag tidying, and wiki writing :)

Violet_Rose said:
I would say change modern_zodiac to western_zodiac and leave chinese_zodiac as it is, that's how people mostly know it and even though it's widely used in Asian countries, it's a Chinese creation. I would try to provide cultural attribution to the western zodiac too, but the book it's mostly derived from was written by a Greco-Roman scholar who lived in Egypt, borrowing from a handful of Babylonian ideas, and on top of that, even if we take what seems to be the largest influence and call it greek_zodiac, nobody's going to know to call it that.

As for the signs, sign_(zodiac) does seem like the most user-friendly form.

For Chinese zodiac, you might have a point -- Even wikipedia calls it 'Chinese'... but eastern and western match up so nicely. :) Well, we'll see what others say, if anything ;) But if we go with Chinese_zodiac, we should totally alias eastern_zodiac to to it instead. One way or anything :)

Plus, it'd offer expansion if it ever comes up, but out side of.. like, okay cupid quizes, I don't think there is an equivalent popular animal-analog-astrology system. :D But when the aliens arrive in 2027 and bring their telepathic astrological calendar with them and we accept their 28 astrological signs as our own, we'll be ready :D

Thank you much Ms. Rose :D

(I will probably start organizing posts--any changes I make will be relatively easily changed if we mutually disagree later.)

Oh, another question.

For the Chinese zodiac:

• Rabbit_(zodiac) or hare_(zodiac)?

goat_(zodiac) or sheep_(zodiac) or ram_(zodiac)?
pig_(zodiac) or boar_(zodiac)?

The difference is largely linguistic-- in some countries the word they use refers too one, the other, or both. Though some places the distinction is cultural-- China uses pig, while Japan uses the boar.

But, over here in the US, I think everyone learns a different one depending on where they are, etc. :) So, obviously, we'd need to set up aliases so we don't have pigs AND boars running around. ... but which word do we use?

(I think I like rabbit (hares are bigger/taller than rabbits, and I bet a lot of our posts will be 'cute bunny girls'), goat (or sheep, honestly. Not ram, as that's more gender specific.) and boar, but I'm a bit biased, being a boar myself.)

SnowWolf said:
For the Chinese zodiac:

• Rabbit_(zodiac) or hare_(zodiac)?

goat_(zodiac) or sheep_(zodiac) or ram_(zodiac)?
pig_(zodiac) or boar_(zodiac)?

We already have tags for the Chinese zodiac, plus pending implications (forum #229974).

Chinese is by year (unlike the Western zodiac), so they're currently tagged as: https://e621.net/tag?name=year_of_the*

Tried to sneak a ninja edit in, but wasn't ninja enough.

Of course... rooster is also gender-specific, but I've never heard anyone says "I was born in the year of the chicken!" so maybe RAM is better..?

Genjar said:
We already have tags for the Chinese zodiac, actually.
Chinese one is by year (unlike the Western zodiac), so they're currently tagged as: https://e621.net/tag?name=year_of_the*

I did also find the year_of_the_whatever tags... though they don't seem to fulfill the same purpose? Not quite anyway.

post #1197619 for example, has both monkey and rooster, but is only tagged with year_of_the_rooster, not monkey. Year of the Rooster is the most tagged, but about a third of the pictures are just "a rooster" without any 'happy new year' or anything to suggest that this is, specifically, and exactly, a Chinese new year celebration. In ways, it's almost like a set.

There's also the chinese_new_year tag, which is a all-zodiac tag, but also includes a few pictures of characters celebrating the chinese new year, without any real indication of what the incoming year is:

post #1113414 post #836740 post #190198

And then there's posts like post #35193 where the point is to draw of them at once, and isn't directly celebrating a year of the anything.

I mean... If this was 6 years ago, I'd suggest that we keep most of them and let them all fulfill their own unique purposes (that is, year_of_the_* referring to any appropriate pictures (rooster pictures made around rooster year, etc), letting chinese new year refer to any sort of obvious 'chinese new year' trappings)

But that would seem to be redundant, honestly.

I propose:

chinese_zodiac as an 'umbrella' tag for the zodiac figure
*_(zodiac) or *_(chinese_zodiac) for the individual "characters" of the zodiac
Chinese_new_year for any pictures showing characters celebrating in some fashion

..and probably do away with "year of the *" tags but put them in sets? i dunno. I'm thinking outloud mostly. (and need to run off, so...)

So!

Western Zodiac:

I have:
1) Gone through all currently existing tags regarding the western_zodiac
2) Uploaded several more western_zodiac-related images. Because pretties. :)
3) Created wiki page for western_zodiac as well as all of the western zodiac signs. All are linked through the western_zodiac, if you want to look.
4) Created wiki pages for each symbol, as well. Those are linked too, but they're not in-your-face.

What I need:

The following tags should imply western_zodiac

• Aries_(zodiac)

Taurus_(zodiac)
Gemini_(zodiac)
Cancer_(zodiac)
Leo_(zodiac)
Virgo_(zodiac)
Libra_(zodiac)
Scorpio_(zodiac)
Ophiuchus_(zodiac)
Sagittarius_(zodiac)
Capricorn_(zodiac)
Aquarius_(zodiac)
Pisces_(zodiac)

(of course, we could change the name of the tag if we'd like, it's not too much work.)

And... that's it!

Then I can start on the chinese zodiac stuff... once we figure out what we want to do with that.

The debate is, to remind those returning to the thread:

1. Animal names: rabbit vs hare, goat vs. sheep vs. ram, pig vs boar?
- I think I prefer hare, goat and boar, but whatever.

2. Year_of_the_dragon vs dragon_(zodiac)?
- While *_(zodiac) is more consistent with the other tags, though year_of_the_* is probably more recognizable.

In the mean time, I'll work on unifying things under one tag or another--changing a tag isn't hard later. :)

On an aditional note, I cleaned out all of the western zodiac-named tags. AS in aries. Some zodiac names are REALLY popular character names (as in, there are a LOT of "aries" out there. ), so there are now a lot of aries_(owner) tags :P

Not sure if they should be disambiguated or whatever, but there were a few hiccups in my plan.

• Capricorn is currently a species tag. This is probably not a bad thing. though capricorn_(species) might not be a bad idea?

• Cancer. ...I left everything about the disease tagged cancer, but also tagged it cancer_(disease) This is redundant, but sensitive! So we probably shouldn't mess with blacklists...? There were surprisingly few 'lol this post is cancer' posts in the 'cancer' tag, on the plus side. go us!

Question about the *_(zodiac) tags and year_of_the_* tags:

wandered across
post #1406299
where tags were edited:
"+year_of_the_cat +year_of_the_goat +year_of_the_monkey +year_of_the_ox +year_of_the_pig +year_of_the_rooster +year_of_the_tiger -cat_(zodiac) -goat_(zodiac) -monkey_(zodiac) -ox_(zodiac) -pig_(zodiac) -rooster_(zodiac) -tiger_(zodiac)"

translation of that edit:
-cat_(zodiac) replaced with +year_of_the_cat
-goat_(zodiac) replaced with +year_of_the_goat
-monkey_(zodiac) replaced with +year_of_the_monkey
-ox_(zodiac) replaced with +year_of_the_ox
-pig_(zodiac) replaced with +year_of_the_pig
-rooster_(zodiac) replaced with +year_of_the_rooster
and finally
-tiger_(zodiac) replaced with +year_of_the_tiger

All those *_(zodiac) tags now empty (and don't seem to alias to anything),
even though there are other *_(zodiac) tags
and what we see in the image are usually the zodiac characters.

(for example) For character such as zodiac goat, should it be tagged with goat_(zodiac) in addition to year_of_the_goat???

listerthesquirrel said:
All those *_(zodiac) tags now empty (and don't seem to alias to anything),
even though there are other *_(zodiac) tags
and what we see in the image are usually the zodiac characters.

(for example) For character such as zodiac goat, should it be tagged with goat_(zodiac) in addition to year_of_the_goat???

For what its worth, the Chinese zodiac animals aren't usually depicted as specific characters*, but rather as generic animals.
^{* The only "true" Chinese zodiac characters are those tied to a specific origin story, see Great Race.}

As an extra side note, the Cat is actually not part of the original Chinese zodiac animals (having missed/lost the race). They only exist in other Asian zodiac variations.