Implicating white_lion → lion
Link to implication

Reason:

White lions are a breed of lion.

Approved.

white lion is not really a breed tho. its just a regular lion with white fur. i think that alias would have been better.

Mutisija said:
white lion is not really a breed tho. its just a regular lion with white fur. i think that alias would have been better.

I'd have to agree.

Mutisija said:
white lion is not really a breed tho. its just a regular lion with white fur. i think that alias would have been better.

The white lion is a rare color mutation of the Timbavati area. White lions are the same as the tawny African Lion (Panthera leo krugeri) found in some wildlife reserves in South Africa and in zoos around the world. White lions are not a separate subspecies and are thought to be indigenous to the Timbavati region of South Africa for centuries, although the earliest recorded sighting in this region was in 1938.

Yep.

We do have at least one similar tag. Black_panther, which is also a simple color variant. Either all of those should be kept, or aliased away.

Basically, blank panthers are just melanistic panthers. And white lions are albinistic leucistic.

+1 for alias to albanistic_lion

Nah just kidding. Alias is fine.

Genjar said:
And white lions are albinistic.

wrong, they are not even albinos, they are literally just lions with white fur.

Mutisija said:
wrong, they are not even albinos, they are literally just lions with white fur.

As far as I understand it it's at least the same gene. It isn't a separate species but it is a rare mutation, probably notable enough but it is somewhat already covered by white_fur + lion. Anyways, it's not like we're doing DNA analysis on the jpgs here (I just imagine some biology-inclined person from FA including the DNA sequences on their reference sheet to go with the neon green tail, hyper cock, and Def Leopard t-shirt!)

The only thing I'm concerned about when allowing something like "white lion" is people adding tags like "brown_horse" which might not end up getting tagged with horse. So it's best to discourage it for the most part since covering every possible color_species is a fruitless endevour (unless we could somehow automate it on the back end).

There are obviously going to be a few exceptions we are going to have to make since some are actually distinct species (white tigers and the dragons come to mind), but from what I've seen it isn't currently that big of a problem. Usually people end up tagging horse + invalid_color instead.

Later in the week I plan on going through the long tail of misc species and compiling a megathread/list of cases like this including species that need implications. We can discuss it then if a conclusion hasn't already been made here as well.

Genjar said:
We do have at least one similar tag. Black_panther, which is also a simple color variant. Either all of those should be kept, or aliased away.

difference is that black panther is actually commonly used term while white lion is on same level with brown cat and white horse.

Mutisija said:
difference is that black panther is actually commonly used term while white lion is on same level with brown cat and white horse.

White Lion is the name of a band. :/

This was one I could see going either way. Even though it sounds like a junk descriptive tag (like "white_horse", "brown_cat" etc) there's actually a little bit more to it than that. What is significant about them is not exactly an actual species distinction, it is still quite notable. In art, it's not going to look like much except a light-coated lion and could probably be approximated with a search. But there's a few factors which make this whole debate a lot more complicated than first meets the eye.

For one thing: even though we don't allow descriptive color_species tags, there's well over a dozen official species names which follow this formula that we have to make an exception for. Sometimes people assume they're meant to be literal descriptive tags but it doesn't come up or cause as much problems in the tags as you'd think. Species like blue_whale, blue_jay, bluebird, red_panda, red_fox, white_wolf, brown_bear, black_bear etc will always be official species names which sound like descriptive tags. And some of them are even misnomers since both black_bears and brown_bears actually come in a full range of colors, and even in real life they have to clarify that the species name is not descriptive of the colors they come in. That's just something we have to deal with.

And then there's the not-species-but-distinctly-notable terms like black_panther, white_lion, white_tiger, etc. There's a few of these. We could just alias them away since they are debatable. But they are notable real-life exceptions to the normal coloration, even if they're not technically a species. And that makes them fairly distinctive.

So white_lion we could alias away to --> lion. OR we could keep it and implicate it to --> leucistic and lion.

Black_panther is fairly distinctive and in common usage for a melanistic big cat from any species, so it might be worth keeping as a tag. We could implicate black_panther to --> melanistic. If black_panther is kept for 'melanistic big cats' then we could alias black_jaguar, melanistic_jaguar, black_leopard, and melanistic_leopard to --> black_panther. Which cleans up a lot of duplicate tags.

(on a side note: black_panther is currently implicated to --> panther. However "panther" doesn't refer to any specific species of big cat. Instead it's a generic term for any big cat, and depending on region it is commonly used for leopards, jaguars and cougars. So I wonder about aliasing away panther to --> feline, and then moving the black_panther implication to go to --> feline instead.)

There's also white_jaguar, which are leucistic jaguars and, if kept, it could be implicated to --> leucistic and jaguar.

And then there's white_tigers, which are fairly distinctive. Using other search terms to separate white_tigers from other tigers might be the hardest of all of these species to do without the tag, since even normal tigers have white_fur. But it is distinctive enough that people will be searching for it as a well-known variant of the tiger species.

Probably most important for this whole discussion: the average user is not going to care that they're technically just a coat variation off of a normal tiger. They're going to still want to search them up easily as a distinct subtype of tiger. So getting rid of these tags might be taking the technicality beyond the point of usefulness on all of these well recognized melanistic and leucistic subtypes. But if we decided to keep the white_tiger tag, then we could implicate white_tiger to --> leucistic.