Now that shirtless and pantsless have been de-aliased from topless and bottomless respectively, a lot of images can be more accurately tagged than before. This has caused the inevitable growing pains from people who still think the tags mean the same thing - I just went through the entire pantsless gallery and removed about half of its posts that should have been (and in some cases already were) tagged with bottomless instead.

A brief glance at the current search results for shirtless reveals it suffers from the exact same problem, e.g. post #2696239 was tagged with both topless and shirtless by Millcore, which is particularly disappointing given that she was the one who approved the original de-alias request!

Before I go all in on trying to fix this, I'd like to solicit feedback from other users, particularly those who have more experience tagging female characters than I do (and preferably don't have female -male on their blacklist, unlike me). What do you think constitutes enough topwear to not be topless, but not enough to not be shirtless? The given examples in the de-alias request were a bra or chest_wraps, which implies the nipples should be covered somehow, so would pasties count? What about characters with multi_nipples or udders? Since stockings are allowed to be tagged with bottomless, I assume elbow_gloves or arm_warmers would be compatible with topless? And where does all this leave the twitter_hoodie?

I was trying to update the wiki pages to give clearer (or at least not outright wrong) information earlier, and one thing I kept wishing was that bra didn't imply underwear. IMO, we should have a separate tag for garments that can be the difference between a Questionable and Explicit rating by their mere presence or absence, and on this site (unlike certain others) even female presenting nipples aren't enough for an E-rating alone. I'm not sure what an intuitive solution might be, though - the best I could come up with was "upper underwear" and "lower underwear". Right now, a statement like "a character wearing a shirt and underwear but no pants" is more vulnerable to misinterpretation than I would like.

For now, I've held off on updating the shirtless wiki page pending some kind of community consensus on the legal definition of a "shirt".

wat8548 said:
A brief glance at the current search results for shirtless reveals it suffers from the exact same problem, e.g. post #2696239 was tagged with both topless and shirtless by Millcore, which is particularly disappointing given that she was the one who approved the original de-alias request!

The de-alias just means it's recognized to not be the same, it doesn't mean they can't ever both apply. By definition, a character that's topless must also be shirtless, so implications like topless -> shirtless and bottomless -> pantsless make sense to do, it's just the reverse that's not always true which makes an alias inappropriate.

wat8548 said:
The given examples in the de-alias request were a bra or chest_wraps, which implies the nipples should be covered somehow, so would pasties count? What about characters with multi_nipples or udders?

The visibility of nipples doesn't matter. It only matters if they're wearing topwear that's not a shirt. If someone's wearing something that's considered topwear and also not wearing a shirt, they're shirtless and not topless. A female wearing an open jacket where you can see they're not wearing a shirt, is shirtless and not topless, regardless of whether their breasts are exposed or not.

watsit said:
The de-alias just means it's recognized to not be the same, it doesn't mean they can't ever both apply. By definition, a character that's topless must also be shirtless, so implications like topless -> shirtless and bottomless -> pantsless make sense to do, it's just the reverse that's not always true which makes an alias inappropriate.

Why would you choose to make a tag, especially a brand new tag, less useful? By your logic, nude should imply both bottomless and topless. The whole point of the *less tags is that they are as much defined by what the characters are wearing as what they aren't.

watsit said:
The visibility of nipples doesn't matter. It only matters if they're wearing topwear that's not a shirt. If someone's wearing something that's considered topwear and also not wearing a shirt, they're shirtless and not topless. A female wearing an open jacket where you can see they're not wearing a shirt, is shirtless and not topless, regardless of whether their breasts are exposed or not.

So you're saying shirtless should be defined in terms of the implications to shirt?

wat8548 said:
Why would you choose to make a tag, especially a brand new tag, less useful? By your logic, nude should imply both bottomless and topless. The whole point of the *less tags is that they are as much defined by what the characters are wearing as what they aren't.

Topless is explicitly defined to be tagged when the character is not bottomless. There's no such similarity for shirtless only applying if the character is not fully topless. I'm not sure such a distinction between topless and shirtless is something people will think of, especially since many characters would only wear a shirt for topwear.

wat8548 said:
So you're saying shirtless should be defined in terms of the implications to shirt?

Shirtless should be defined in terms of not wearing a shirt while not being fully nude.

watsit said:
Topless is explicitly defined to be tagged when the character is not bottomless. There's no such similarity for shirtless only applying if the character is not fully topless.

Right now, the only thing the shirtless wiki page explicitly defines it as is "Defunct tag." The reason I started this thread is to attempt to come up with any definition at all!

So since there is no current official definition, I repeat my previous question: why do you think the official definition that should be adopted is one which makes certain scenarios impossible to unambiguously tag, no matter how low demand you personally believe those scenarios to be in?