I noticed that the kangaroo tag had gone missing from a bunch of my uploads, and have been replaced with the macropod tag. When I tried putting the tags back in, they wouldn't stay, and then when I tried to find other pictures with the kangaroo tag, I've discovered that the tag has apparently been expunged from the site. What happened? Did someone decide to alias "kangaroo" to "macropod?" That makes no sense, because 1.) Not all macropods are kangaroos and 2.) even if they were, no one outside of zoologists actually use the term "macropod" on a regular basis.

According to the wiki entry on the site, kangaroo has, in fact, been aliased to macropod.

ikdind said:
According to the wiki entry on the site, kangaroo has, in fact, been aliased to macropod.

Then my objections still stand, especially since horse hasn't been aliased to equine.

Also: Just because the tag has been aliased doesn't mean people searching for kangaroo will come up empty. They'll see all images with macropod, instead.

I wasn't able to find a forum thread about the alias, so I don't know whether there was any discussion about this.

One the one hand, macropod includes wallaby and quokka, which seem visually more distinct from other macropodidae. kangaroo seems like it would have been a useful implication to have between macropod and the following:

• red_kangaroo
• grey_kangaroo
• western_grey_kangaroo
• eastern_grey_kangaroo
• antilopine_kangaroo

On the other hand, I suspect the best argument for eliminating kangaroo, comes from tree-kangaroo, which is also under macropods, literally contains the word "kangaroo" in its name, and yet is visually distinct from other kangaroos.

In any case, I think it would be best to choose one of the subspecies of kangaroo, as they have not been aliased away, and if there are changes to kangaroo that bring it back into existence, using an appropriate subspecies will be the most likely route to automatically having kangaroo implicated correctly.

ikdind said:
According to the wiki entry on the site, kangaroo has, in fact, been aliased to macropod.

I think this was a rash move on the part of the site. We all know what a kangaroo is, but who the hell says "macropod" especially when it includes other animals that aren't kangaroos?