Aliasing Bird --> Avian

Reason: Bird is the metatag for all the various birds on the site, but there's another metatag over Bird. That's Avian. There's almost no difference between Bird and Avian save that Avian includes gryphon while Bird doesn't. A search for Avian -gryphon should return all of the Bird results (and more, because the bird tag is far more often missed than the avian tag is). Since its effects can be replicated with a two-tag search, it seems to me that the bird tag is just bloat that should just go away.

I'm not sure I agree...what if I'm looking for birds only? Why should I have to substitute two tags for one when the griffin-lovers can use avian for all winged creatures and/or search "gryphon" for just griffins?

I think it should stay. "bird" is a category for birds only and if avian only included birds, it would be the one to remove.

Except for the 27 pages of posts in avian -gryphon -bird
Kinda ruins your point a bit.

Hammie said:
Except for the 27 pages of posts in avian -gryphon -bird
Kinda ruins your point a bit.

Nooo, that was actually part of my point. Bird is massively undertagged. It's a mishandled tag.

Hammie said:
Except for the 27 pages of posts in avian -gryphon -bird
Kinda ruins your point a bit.

So what's in avian -gryphon -bird ? are all those posts mistagged? what other avian species have we missed?

SnowWolf said:
So what's in avian -gryphon -bird ? are all those posts mistagged? what other avian species have we missed?

The vast majority of them are mistagged. On the first page of results for that, I see only one image that shouldn't have either the bird tag or the gryphon tag. That's this one:

post #242250

I'm not sure that should have the avian tag, either.

According to the wiki, avian simply means "has bird features".
So, feathers, a beak, feathered wings, bird talons, etc. all should qualify.

Even pegasi technically fit the wiki definition, and ought to imo.

If we're calling a gryphon an avian and it only has wings and head that are avian(sometimes feet, but that's not the original gryphon) that's only 2 bird parts.
Pegasi only technically only have 1, but out of all the bits a creature has, the difference between 2 and 1 is pretty small.

Oh, and Moonkin is a good example of avian but not bird as well.

Edit: to be fair, there are a lot of untagged bird tags in that too.

...does that mean we have to change swallow_(bird) to swallow_(avian)?

Certainly not, swallow is a subset of bird which is a subset of avian.
No need to step back twice.

I always thought of the whole bird vs avian argument to be synonymous with cat vs feline and dog vs canine in that avian is the broadest umbrella term and bird just describes the generic "beak and feathers" but nothing noteworthy enough to classify it further.

I've added a lot of bird tags in my time. That was the experience which led me to create this thread. It was either that or create a thread that said "Implicate the various birds --> bird" so that the tag would be fixed.

The sub-groups of bird implying bird is probably the better, albeit more labor intensive solution.