Should this tag apply to any art that falls under this jurisdiction, or only characters with visible breasts/genitalia (ie: "something to hide")?

An absolutely massive number of cartoon and anime characters could be considered mostly nude but are featureless where it would normally apply.

I am feeling a bit hesitant here as well, although I try to follow the basis on fully_clothed, partially_clothed, mostly_nude and nude as set on the lattermost wiki page stating: Feral characters can be tagged as nude when they're not wearing clothing. Based on that, my general judgement is aimed at:

pants and top -> fully clothed
pants or top -> partially clothed
no pants or top, but some clothing -> mostly nude
nothing more than accessories (collars etc.) -> nude

...regardless of the state of furrines/toonyness/feralness.

But it's not easy to put a nude tag on picture with feral pigeons on the background. For example:
post #2403924
Should have nude because of the bunny, the birds and the butterflies?

My general takeaway is:

pants+shirt+covered genitals/breasts/butt -> fully clothed
bottomwear and/or topwear+uncovered genitals or breasts or butt -> partially clothed (this can include an otherwise fully_clothed character, but with their pants open showing off their genitals, or their shirt pulled up showing off their breasts)
mostly removed clothing or only clothing not designed to cover genitals -> mostly nude
nothing but (non-clothing) accessories, if anything -> nude

Note, though, that contrary to the current wiki, ferals are normally not tagged nude since the lack of any clothing is normal for them. Not sure when or why it was decided they 'can' optionally be tagged nude, but it's rather redundant 99% of the time, and causes issues with searching (as indicated by urielfrys' example; tagging that nude because of the butterflies, birds, or rabbit is rather silly). There is instead the clothed_feral tag to indicate a feral is wearing some amount of clothing, since it's less often the case (which can be used with one of the other non-nude tags for the amount and coverage of clothing).

watsit said:
Not sure when or why it was decided they 'can' optionally be tagged nude

The answer to your question is that the user leomole decided, apparently unilaterally, to add the first reference to nude being eligible for feral characters to the wiki in September 2018 (diff 1, diff 2 ). Then, in December of the same year, user engageforth removed leomole's clarification that the nude tag is optional for feral characters (diff 3, diff 4 ). That leaves us with the present nonsensical situation.

Unless any admins have objections I think it would be best to remove the remaining sentence, and perhaps replace it with one saying the opposite and linking to clothed_feral.

^{Also why is it that whenever I want to link to a wiki page that ends in a close bracket, the bracket isn't counted as part of the link, but whenever I want to follow a link target with a close bracket in the text, the bracket suddenly is counted as part of the link? I fucking hate DText. We should've never had the hubris to believe we could improve on BBCode.}

This appears to be the relevant thread: topic #21234

The argument in favour is based on a fallacy that it is TWYK to "expect" a feral to be nude. But that's reductio ad absurdum: there is no way to eliminate all human "knowledge" from this site, given that all artwork on here was produced by humans, and all but the most abstract of it is intended to be relatable to real-world experiences in some way. The very definition of "feral" is TWYK, since in a vacuum, there is no reason to assume that upright, bipedal creatures with four limbs and one head (tail optional) hold any special status deserving of its own form tag. Furthermore, the definition of clothing assumes some level of resemblance to textile technologies and fashions which have been developed and worn by humans in the real world, with little allowance made for the theoretical evolutionary path taken by modesty preservers in a world populated by ferals, or taurs, or seven-limbed cosmic horrors from a parallel dimension.

TWYS means you can't use your knowledge about the fictional universe depicted in the image. It is not, and never has been, about prohibiting you from using your knowledge about the real world - otherwise tagging would be a completely futile exercise and we might as well replace all tags with "flerbaderp" and "screebledonk". The Standardised Uninformed Tagger (this site's unit of measurement of choice), when confronted with an image of a feral, knows what a feral is and that it is not normal for it to wear clothes. There's no debate to be had here except with a few pedants trying to be too clever for their own good.

With this in mind, and considering that the balance of admin (and user) opinion in both the thread I linked and an even earlier thread linked in turn from there fell on the side of "don't tag ferals as nude", I've gone ahead and made the change I suggested to the nude wiki page. Let us hope that brings an end to it.

I belive the best way here is to emphasize the optionality of nude for feral characters, perhaps even encouraging not to use the tag, but not forbidding it either.

I mainly dislike the idea of "not tagging the default", which I think has effected that most cases of 5_fingers are not tagged. This is, of course, because with toony anthros I've learned 4_fingers to be more of a common thing. However, I don't find myself with a problem with not having the "default" 1_penis and 1_head applied where ever applicable. (Also white_sclera is something that I have yet not used anywhere, although I'm wondering about it every time i put yellow_sclera or black_sclera anywhere.)

urielfrys said:
I belive the best way here is to emphasize the optionality of nude for feral characters, perhaps even encouraging not to use the tag, but not forbidding it either.

That was the originally proposed compromise, and we saw where it lead to. We have plenty of cases of tags which are forbidden in certain scenarios even if technically correct - for example, a nude character is also both bottomless and topless.

On the other hand, I don't believe we have any officially "optional" tags, not least because it would mean an infinite edit war of adding and removing the tag would become completely legal. Technically most tags are "optional" in that you usually won't get in trouble for not using them as long as you meet a minimum total threshold.

Looking at it another way, the existence of a word meaning "lack of clothes" already implies that it should only be applied to things where clothes would otherwise be expected. You wouldn't describe a refrigerator as "nude" no matter how few clothes it is currently wearing.

urielfrys said:
I mainly dislike the idea of "not tagging the default", which I think has effected that most cases of 5_fingers are not tagged. This is, of course, because with toony anthros I've learned 4_fingers to be more of a common thing. However, I don't find myself with a problem with not having the "default" 1_penis and 1_head applied where ever applicable. (Also white_sclera is something that I have yet not used anywhere, although I'm wondering about it every time i put yellow_sclera or black_sclera anywhere.)

white_sclera has been invalidated altogether, which rather underlines the point.