Aliasing tortoise → turtle
Link to alias

Reason:

tldr: Neither term is particularly well-defined. Turtle is already established on e621 (more common, already has implications) so...turtle.

The exact usage of the two is debatable, particulary due to regionalisms. In the US, turtle is a catch-all term and includes tortoises, in the UK they are generally separate creatures depending partially on behavior, in some other areas I've heard tortoise is sometimes used as the catch-all term. There's also terrapins which...well you get the idea. Point is, there isn't even an easy way to consistently tag the two. Also, I doubt that many people would look for one and want to exclude the other.

Don't turtles have fins while tortoises have feet?

Either way most people use turtle for both anyway.

Ko-san said:
Don't turtles have fins while tortoises have feet?

Either way most people use turtle for both anyway.

No. There are land turtles, such as box turtles. Sea turtles are their own subspecies. There's also the alligator snapping turtle, which has feet.

How about aliasing both to "chelonian" and watching people scratch their heads over it? :p

In any case, Wikipedia (admittedly not the world's most objectively reliable source, but it's a starting point) goes with "turtle". A turtle by any other name would smell just as briney.

Why would we alias these at all when just the other day we were having a discussion on how to tag husky vs. siberian husky.
We don't try to be less specific here generally speaking.

Halite said:
Why would we alias these at all when just the other day we were having a discussion on how to tag husky vs. siberian husky.
We don't try to be less specific here generally speaking.

Didn't they decide on aliasing that, because the Average Joe isn't going to be able to tell a discernible difference? People aren't going to come here looking for a Apalachicola Snapping Turtle vs a Aldabra Giant Tortoise. They're more likely than not just going to search turtle, looking for a reptile with a shell.

Ko-san said:
Didn't they decide on aliasing that, because the Average Joe isn't going to be able to tell a discernible difference? People aren't going to come here looking for a Apalachicola Snapping Turtle vs a Aldabra Giant Tortoise. They're more likely than not just going to search turtle, looking for a reptile with a shell.

They in fact decided to not alias it, because more specific was better.

Yes but the differences between tortoise and turtle are not clear, we should agree on a consensus then since both seem to be used interchangebely.
I would also add that I'm am not english, when I learned to speak english they taught us that a turtle was for a land turtle and tortoise for sea turtle, don't know if its going to help much but I'm putting this out there for the record.

Halite said:
They in fact decided to not alias it, because more specific was better.

Maybe I'm looking at a different thread?

I'm just gonna go ahead and say +1 for this alias since that's how I use it, but I know that there will be some furs out there who take offense.

-1 from me.
The difference between the two species is significant enough to warrant separate (correct) tags.
If this goes through, then we might as well alias all dogs together as well. They look sorta similar.

Peekaboo said:
-1 from me.
The difference between the two species is significant enough to warrant separate (correct) tags.
If this goes through, then we might as well alias all dogs together as well. They look sorta similar.

Then we need to enforce the use of the right tag since a lot of tortoise/turtles are mistagged.

Peekaboo said:
-1 from me.
The difference between the two species is significant enough to warrant separate (correct) tags.
If this goes through, then we might as well alias all dogs together as well. They look sorta similar.

You wanna fix the tags as you can easily see the difference?

Peekaboo said:
-1 from me.
The difference between the two species is significant enough to warrant separate (correct) tags.
If this goes through, then we might as well alias all dogs together as well. They look sorta similar.

The difference isn't very well-defined even among biologists. Furthermore, what do we do in the case of a turtle/tortoise with no features that doesn't categorize one way or the other? ambiguous_turtle? chelonoid? If we go with anything, tortoise is usually defined as being a type of turtle, so "implication tortoise->turtle", we could probably do this for terrapin as well if anyone remembers what those are.

We do this already as dog is often tagged as well. Biologically, dogs are one of the rare cases where things are neatly shoved into one category, since they all share a recent common ancestor.

Ko-san said:
You wanna fix the tags as you can easily see the difference?

Sure. I'll put it in my to-do list.

parasprite said:
If we go with anything, tortoise is usually defined as being a type of turtle, so "implication tortoise->turtle", we could probably do this for terrapin as well if anyone remembers what those are.

I'd support that.

this isn't even remotely scientifically accurate

tortoises live on land and don't tend to swim, most tortoises are in the testudinidae family

terrapins swim, are small, generally edible, and live in brackwater areas

turtle generally refers to sea dwelling creatures

turtle is also a blanket term, so all terrapins are turtles and all tortoises are turtles and some turtles are neither terrapins nor tortoises

all the animals belong to the superorder chelonia

this is basic zoology people

These really shouldn't be combined in any way, or even implicated.

I can see few feral tortoises that could be tagged as such, but how does one tell the difference between an anthro turtle and tortoise?

Definitely at least implicate it, like parasprite suggested. So we can tag the ambiguous ones as 'turtle' by default.

the only remotely accurate set of aliases would be the following:

turtle -> chelonian

tortoise -> chelonian

terrapin -> chelonian

null0010 said:
this isn't even remotely scientifically accurate

tortoises live on land and don't tend to swim, most tortoises are in the testudinidae family

terrapins swim, are small, generally edible, and live in brackwater areas

turtle generally refers to sea dwelling creatures

turtle is also a blanket term, so all terrapins are turtles and all tortoises are turtles and some turtles are neither terrapins nor tortoises

all the animals belong to the superorder chelonia

this is basic zoology people

It's not as basic as you'd think since regional definitions confuse things. That being said, I generally agree with what you've said.

For fun I've included UK and US definitions of turtle/tortoise:

I think I'm going to go netral in the end, this seems to be a lot more complicated than one would think at first glance.

Regardless of where the separation is, there is a separation.
We really shouldn't be sticking them together.

Looks like they already had a surprisingly detailed wiki entry for turtle (2011), and going by that alone tortoise would actually taxonomically fit into turtle as a sort of ssp.

tortoise -(implies)-> turtle -(implies)-> reptile

Either way we should at least have

tortoise -(implies)-> reptile

So basically, it boils down to this:

The words "turtle", "tortoise" are used differently depending on regional language difference in English. The British use it differently than the Americans. Honestly, situations like that are fairly common and we usually pick the American definition because that's the country this website is headquartered in.

In biology circles, they solve this language problem by relying on the latin and calling the whole group "chelonians". However, I don't think chelonian makes a very good tag. It's technical, a little harder to spell, etc. But most importantly, your average user is not going to know what the hell that word is when it shows up in their searches or tags. If there's another option that's more user-friendly, then I think we'd better off taking it.

Most of this thread has focused on the taxonomic definitions and the linguistic definitions varying by region. However, there's limits on how closely we can follow that. Biologists do not have to classify anthro turtles with human cocks banging rodents. We do. Biologists find their subjects in the habitat they live in, making habitat useful information to narrow down which word to use (tortoise, turtle, ocean, freshwater, land, desert, etc). But we have art of turtle-like creatures in kitchens, in sewers, in pools, in outer space and even a few that fly. Some are anthro, hybrids, feral, fantasy. They can have flippers like a sea turtle but still be walking on their hind legs - a mix between water and land based types of chelorians. Taxonomy can only take us so far before we run into things they don't have in their system at all. So even if both British English and American English agree that most of the time "tortoise" is for land-based chelonians, how does that actually help us tag an image with an turtle-shelled anthro laying on their couch masturbating with humanlike hands? Turtle-like, but no way of knowing which group of chelonians the artist decided to anthrofy this time.

The main problem is that a lot of artists draw these with just enough clues to resemble something in the chelonian family but not enough to get much more specific than that. Which means the majority of images are going to need a completely generic umbrella tag for species group because they won't be able to get any more specific than "turtle-like". And any differences the real world of biology has between land or sea based chelonians doesn't really apply to the majority of our cartoon based and anthro based chelonians. For too many chelonian images, the difference between these animals in real life is inapplicable.

So, in conclusion:

Since "turtle" is a generic umbrella term for all chelonians in American English and because we favor the American English terms when there's a conflict between multiple dialects of English. This means that turtle is going to be the generic tag for all chelonians. The other more specific subtypes and turtle species are implicated to it.

• If the turtle is clearly a water-based chelonian then they're tagged with marine_turtle. Since this isn't always easy to know by species, it also applies when a chelonian is in a water environment regardless of physical build. So places like a pond, stream, or if they're swimming or underwater. This retains functionality of being able to search for the water-based chelonians (when they are distinguishable from other chelonians). But is a more clear name for it, regardless of which brand of English someone speaks. It's a compromise. And marine_turtle has been implicated to --> turtle as a more specific sub-category for all water-based chelonians.
• If it has flippers or otherwise seems to be one of the actual "sea turtle" species, then it can be tagged sea_turtle. This tag is implicated to --> marine_turtle as a more specific species of water-based chelonian.
• If it's clearly in the desert or there's enough reason to think it's a land-based chelonian, then we can tag it tortoise. This is also now implicated to --> turtle as a more specific sub-category for all land-based chelonians.
• If it's neither (flying turtle, ambiguous turtle, a little too anthro to know for sure either way, etc) then it just gets tagged with turtle as the generic tag for all chelonians.

I think this solution is workable and more taggable than what we had. It still allows them to be distinguished when there's enough information to separate them but also gives us more consistency for the tag group as a whole. It gives us an umbrella tag for the ambiguous images that can't be as specifically tagged. While it also allows searches for turtle to still give people all of the chelonian images in one place without making them search more than one tag like it used to be.

Seems a bit odd, but it's definitely workable and intuitive.

Oh, I should mention, what about terrapin? Nothing is tagged under it but it's the only other turtle type that I know of (you know, except things like box turtle, snapping turtle, painted turtle, etc.). Leave as is or implicate?

parasprite said:
Seems a bit odd, but it's definitely workable and intuitive.

Oh, I should mention, what about terrapin? Nothing is tagged under it but it's the only other turtle type that I know of (you know, except things like box turtle, snapping turtle, painted turtle, etc.). Leave as is or implicate?

I think I'll probably leave it for now since it's not being used for anything and a lot of turtle pictures are pretty generic so I'm not sure how often it could be used anyways. If it becomes used for something in the future, we can address it then. I just find it hard to justify implicating a tag which no one is using yet. But thanks for bringing it up, it's a good question.

furrypickle said:
So:

Since "turtle" is a generic umbrella term for all chelonians in American English and because we favor the American English terms when there's a conflict between multiple dialects of English. This means that turtle is going to be the generic tag for all chelonians. The other more specific subtypes and turtle species are implicated to it.

• If the turtle is clearly a water-based chelonian then they're tagged with marine_turtle. Since this isn't always easy to know by species, it also applies when a chelonian is in a water environment regardless of physical build. So places like a pond, stream, or if they're swimming or underwater. This retains functionality of being able to search for the water-based chelonians (when they are distinguishable from other chelonians). But is a more clear name for it, regardless of which brand of English someone speaks. It's a compromise. And marine_turtle has been implicated to --> turtle as a more specific sub-category for all water-based chelonians.
• If it has flippers or otherwise seems to be one of the actual "sea turtle" species, then it can be tagged sea_turtle. This tag is implicated to --> marine_turtle as a more specific species of water-based chelonian.
• If it's clearly in the desert or there's enough reason to think it's a land-based chelonian, then we can tag it tortoise. This is also now implicated to --> turtle as a more specific sub-category for all land-based chelonians.
• If it's neither (flying turtle, ambiguous turtle, a little too anthro to know for sure either way, etc) then it just gets tagged with turtle as the generic tag for all chelonians.

I think this solution is workable and more taggable than what we had. It still allows them to be distinguished when there's enough information to separate them but also gives us more consistency for the tag group as a whole. It gives us an umbrella tag for the ambiguous images that can't be as specifically tagged. While it also allows searches for turtle to still give people all of the chelonian images in one place without making them search more than one tag like it used to be.

Is that a maybe-to-be-implemented or was it already implemented? I didn't see any color so it's hard to tell :(

Furrin_Gok said:
Is that a maybe-to-be-implemented or was it already implemented? I didn't see any color so it's hard to tell :(

Already implemented. But I added some color leading into the description of what was done, just to make it more clear.

furrypickle said:
Already implemented. But I added some color leading into the description of what was done, just to make it more clear.

Thanks :)