The bulk update request #2539 is active.

change category blue_dragon (0) -> invalid

Reason: This tag is used on several images with blue dragons. It's currently set as a copyright tag, but there's no wiki indicating what company this copyright is owned by. I also see there's another tag blue_dragon_(series), maybe for people wanting a copyright this is what they were looking for?

EDIT: The bulk update request #2539 (forum #335729) has been approved by @gattonero2001.

I think it'd be better to alias blue_dragon -> dragon, along with green_dragon, red_dragon, etc, which would result in fewer invalid tags that need cleaning up. Or properly disambiguate them if there's that much confusion between multiple meanings.

Copied from my previous post:

Blue Dragon an Xbox 360 game that apparently nobody remembers... it should probably get aliased to blue_dragon_(game), or some other sort of suffix to help tell people it isn't just some color + species tag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dragon_(video_game%29 (link keeps excluding the second parenthesis, apparently) Thank you, Wolfgang.

siral_exan said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dragon_(video_game) (link keeps excluding the second parenthesis, apparently)

Change ) to %29 and it should work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dragon_(video_game%29

siral_exan said:
Copied from my previous post:

Blue Dragon an Xbox 360 game that apparently nobody remembers... it should probably get aliased to blue_dragon_(game), or some other sort of suffix to help tell people it isn't just some color + species tag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dragon_(video_game%29 (link keeps excluding the second parenthesis, apparently) Thank you, Wolfgang.

if that's what people were generally using the tag for, sure. but it seems like a majority of the tagged posts are just dragons that are blue. so invalidation/disambiguation would seem to be the better route.

siral_exan said:
Copied from my previous post:

Blue Dragon an Xbox 360 game that apparently nobody remembers... it should probably get aliased to blue_dragon_(game), or some other sort of suffix to help tell people it isn't just some color + species tag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dragon_(video_game%29 (link keeps excluding the second parenthesis, apparently) Thank you, Wolfgang.

It looks like blue dragon (series) already covers this: "Blue Dragon is a video game franchise originally based on a design by Final Fantasy series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi."

darryus said:
if that's what people were generally using the tag for, sure. but it seems like a majority of the tagged posts are just dragons that are blue. so invalidation/disambiguation would seem to be the better route.

If anything, by your words we should alias it to blue_body or to dragon instead. Frankly, I am so fed up and want to go on a massive rant on how changing tag categories or making disambiguation pages doesn't actually stop people from just continuing to use these tags, but it's not your fault and doesn't have a place here. It makes me wish we could obliterate some of these tags, in such the same way e6 can destroy posts so they can't even be accessed ever again, but aliasing it to a better tag, one that should be 100% accurate all the time, is probably a better idea. What are your thoughts on aliasing blue_dragon to either blue_body (or etc) or dragon?

siral_exan said:
If anything, by your words we should alias it to blue_body or to dragon instead. Frankly, I am so fed up and want to go on a massive rant on how changing tag categories or making disambiguation pages doesn't actually stop people from just continuing to use these tags, but it's not your fault and doesn't have a place here. It makes me wish we could obliterate some of these tags, in such the same way e6 can destroy posts so they can't even be accessed ever again, but aliasing it to a better tag, one that should be 100% accurate all the time, is probably a better idea. What are your thoughts on aliasing blue_dragon to either blue_body (or etc) or dragon?

tags being used isn't the problem, tags not being fixed is. when a tag seems valid it just sits there forever. when it's set to invalid it gets fixed, usually replaced with an actually valid tag.

edit: also, blue_dragon_(game) is potentially not the only valid disambiguated tag; for example blue dragons in RuneScape are technically their own species of dragon, not just dragons that happen to be blue. so, blue_dragon_(runescape) would be considered a valid tag (we do it for canon yoshi colors). but the tag blue_dragonon it's own is to ambiguous to be aliased in one direction or the other, so invalidation makes sense.

darryus said:
tags being used isn't the problem, tags not being fixed is. when a tag seems valid it just sits there forever. when it's set to invalid it gets fixed, usually replaced with an actually valid tag.

I wonder how often it's the uploader/original tagger doing that, vs we few that have to take sometimes hours crawling through dozens of posts with invalid tags trying to fix them because the poster just tagged it and ignored the clearly invalid tags they added.

darryus said:
tags being used isn't the problem, tags not being fixed is. when a tag seems valid it just sits there forever. when it's set to invalid it gets fixed, usually replaced with an actually valid tag.

Where are you getting the whole "tags getting used" thing? I'll explicitly say that in my problem is that (in my experience) nobody puts in an earnest effort to clean the invalid category. Either by removing invalid tags or by disambiguating the ones capable of disambiguation, there are far too many people making use of invalid tags than there are people removing them, namely the handful of "veteran" users that have the experience "necessary" to remove invalid tags. At this point, I would rather that people be incapable of even using them, that they just vanish into thin air if someone tries to use 'em, but the next best thing is to make 'em go to a valid tag. Since I can clearly see that all the images in the blue_dragon tag clearly show at least one dragon, I'd rather alias it to dragon instead so that instead of having to manually remove an invalid tag each and every time it gets used, I'd only have to remove it sometimes (whenever an image doesn't contain a dragon).

siral_exan said:
Where are you getting the whole "tags getting used" thing?

you literally said:

doesn't actually stop people from just continuing to use these tags

so... that's where I got it from.

siral_exan said:
I'll explicitly say that in my problem is that (in my experience) nobody puts in an earnest effort to clean the invalid category. Either by removing invalid tags or by disambiguating the ones capable of disambiguation, there are far too many people making use of invalid tags than there are people removing them, namely the handful of "veteran" users that have the experience "necessary" to remove invalid tags.

I mean, you can say that, but it dosn't seem to be totally congruent with reality. looking at the tagging history of stuff in the invalid category, tags like gold and tan, for example, are quite often fixed and/or disambiguated by random sub-1k edit users and not just dedicated taggers or "veterans" like us.

siral_exan said:
At this point, I would rather that people be incapable of even using them, that they just vanish into thin air if someone tries to use 'em, but the next best thing is to make 'em go to a valid tag.

that seems pretty extreme, from where I'm standing this system seems pretty effective at making sure posts have as many valid tags as possible, much better than the old system of having diambig tags in the general list, or just aliasing everything to invalid_tag or invalid_color or whatever.

siral_exan said:
Since I can clearly see that all the images in the blue_dragon tag clearly show at least one dragon, I'd rather alias it to dragon instead so that instead of having to manually remove an invalid tag each and every time it gets used, I'd only have to remove it sometimes (whenever an image doesn't contain a dragon).

yeah, I kinda get that, but counterpoint, that'd also add dragon to the autocomplete dropdown for blue*, pushing more useful tags down or totally off of the list. meaning that I'd have to type out more of a tag name _way_ more often. I'd much rather have to append _(series) to a tag or tap ctrl+backspace and change it to blue_scales a couple times a year rather than have to type extra characters into the tag box or cursor further down the list every single time I add a blue_* tag.
in my eyes invalidation is almost always preferable to aliasing.

I guess I see what you mean, I put emphasis in the wrong place after revising what I said multiple times. Really, it seems like this can be boiled down to different philosophies and points of view, so I'll settle with agreeing to disagree.

For some perspective, the current most-used tag in the invalid category has 4 posts, and is invalid_tag itself.

I don't think the panic is justified. If users persistently add invalid tags to images without fixing them, the correct system to deal with that is the disciplinary one, not to remove an at least potentially useful teaching tool.

wat8548 said:
For some perspective, the current most-used tag in the invalid category has 4 posts, and is invalid_tag itself.

Only because some diligent users have bothered to clean them up and continue to monitor them. *_(disambiguation), however, is an absolute disaster.

If an invalid tag can be reasonably aliased to a valid tag without needing to invalidate/disambiguate, I think that’s the way to go. Sometimes those are necessary, sure; but the less of them we can get away with, the better. Less work for our tag-fixers to keep up with. In this case, aliasing to dragon would work just fine. Either the tagger was referring to a dragon that’s blue, a specific blue dragon species like in RuneScape or DnD (which is still a kind of dragon, so dragon is a valid alias), or the game series. But even with the game series, the titular character is, in fact, an actual dragon - and judging from the results from blue_dragon_(series), it seems that most of the characters that we see here are dragons. So even in this case, someone trying to tag the series and getting aliased to dragon would still be valid in virtually all cases.

scaliespe said:
Only because some diligent users have bothered to clean them up and continue to monitor them. *_(disambiguation), however, is an absolute disaster.

it seems like the *_(disambiguation) tags that are under category invalid are clean most of the time. not sure if that's because posts with invalid tags have them right at the top of the screen, making it real obvious that it needs to be fixed, or just that there's a smaller sample size of diambigs under invalid; I'd say that it's probably a little of both.
the problem with the existing disambigs is that they're just so full, and no one wants to deal with them, new ones don't seem to be that much of a problem with the new system. and there's not much of a way for people to even know they've added a bad tag, no "you repopulated an empty tag" pop up, no invalid tag at the top of the list.

darryus said:
the problem with the existing disambigs is that they're just so full, and no one wants to deal with them

In the case of characters, it's also often difficult to impossible to tell what they should be disambiguated to. Seeing something like mark_(disambiguation) in the tag list, with no indication of who Mark is or who owns them, means there's no good way to fix the tag, but it would also be improper to remove it in case someone else recognizes them. Or in case where it means some kind of birth mark or cutie mark that it could be replaced with, can you also be sure the character isn't also supposed to be Mark?

watsit said:
In the case of characters, it's also often difficult to impossible to tell what they should be disambiguated to. Seeing something like mark_(disambiguation) in the tag list, with no indication of who Mark is or who owns them, means there's no good way to fix the tag, but it would also be improper to remove it in case someone else recognizes them. Or in case where it means some kind of birth mark or cutie mark that it could be replaced with, can you also be sure the character isn't also supposed to be Mark?

yeah, ambiguous character names are definitely one of those "no end in site"-type problems for disambigs, some of them could probably be cleaned out a little, but unless we just commit to some radical policy like auto-removing diambigs after a certain amount of time of them sitting on a post or something there's inevitably going to be some name disambiguation tags that just stay forever, the same's probably true for stuff like unknown_character and character_request (and similar unknown_*/*_request tags, for that matter).

but I don't think it really makes sense to generalize that situation to be necessarily true for all disambiguation/invalid category tags, there's pretty obvious reasons for why some of those tags are a mess, but that dosn't mean that all tags with that category or that suffix will have the same problem.

The bulk update request #2539 (forum #335729) has been approved by @gattonero2001.