The bulk update request #3161 is pending approval.

change category copyright_name (228) -> meta
change category commissioner_name (280) -> meta
change category species_name (1432) -> meta
change category scientific_name (83) -> meta

Reason: Names of things written on pictures of things are metadata (data about the pictured thing).

These tags are used like character name and artist name, and documented like them, but they are intended for names of series "copyrights", commissioners; the common species name, or the scientific species binomial.

character name and artist name have the meta nature already. These other terms should too.

These seem a bit overkill to me, and should probably be aliased away to text or something. Is it really important to tag that a species' name is written somewhere on an image, or that the name of the commissioner or copyright holder is somewhere on the image?

watsit said:
These seem a bit overkill to me, and should probably be aliased away to text or something. Is it really important to tag that a species' name is written somewhere on an image, or that the name of the commissioner or copyright holder is somewhere on the image?

*very* few tags are aliased to text right now, and the distinction was important enough to whoever created the wiki pages (hi, @TheVileOne)! Perhaps they should explain. My goal is consistency with the wiki docs only.

Would you argue that character name (3.6K) and artist name (11K) should be aliased to "text or something" too? Yikes.

If so, then I suggest aliasing to something new like metadata text, and implying text from that. I still think that distinguishing (labeling text and explanations) from (dialogue, onomatopoeia, song etc.) is useful in light of tag what you see. The name of someone, or a species name, or a series name written on an image is something you can see, and that can help locate an official external source via e621 itself when you're unclear.

They're not all as useful as character name or artist name. I think the presence of a species name is really quite useful to have tagged on an image, but the presence of a scientific name looks like tag overkill to me too, frankly. And as copyright name alludes to the already muddled copyright: category, it's less useful than it could be. commissioner name seems fairly irrelevant unless you're considering what _(creator-disambiguator) suffix to tag something that needs disambiguation as. Pretty niche, and nobody's using the existing tag anyway.