The bulk update request #3652 (forum #351482) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3653 (forum #351483) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3654 (forum #351484) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3658 is active.

remove implication chiropteran (0) -> mammal (3324204)
remove alias humanoid_bat (0) -> chiropteran_humanoid (0)
remove alias bat_humanoid (568) -> chiropteran_humanoid (0)
remove implication chiropteran_humanoid (0) -> mammal_humanoid (96842)
remove alias bat_taur (2) -> chiropteran_taur (0)
remove implication chiropteran_taur (0) -> mammal_taur (10201)

Reason: This got missed in the hullabaloo

EDIT: The bulk update request #3658 (forum #351517) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3658 (forum #351517) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3659 is active.

Reason: chiropteran --> bat

EDIT: The bulk update request #3659 (forum #351519) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3660 is active.

create alias microchiropteran (0) -> microbat (1338)
create alias microchiroptera (0) -> microbat (1338)
create implication yangochiropteran (1280) -> microbat (1338)
create implication rhinopomatid (0) -> microbat (1338)
create implication rhinolophid (1) -> microbat (1338)
create implication hipposiderid (0) -> microbat (1338)
create implication megadermitid (14) -> microbat (1338)
create implication emballonurid (1) -> microbat (1338)

Reason: microchiropteran -> microbat (too many tags for one BUR)

EDIT: The bulk update request #3660 (forum #351520) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

Ohhhh, I just realised that someone is going to have to update all of these wikis... and to swap out all of the tag names that just changed on every related wiki list. That's going to be a big project. It will be worth it, but it might be busy to keep track of.

furrypickle said:
Ohhhh, I just realised that someone is going to have to update all of these wikis... and to swap out all of the tag names that just changed on every related wiki list. That's going to be a big project. It will be worth it, but it might be busy to keep track of.

ah.

There have been casualties here. Posts with xerneas, sawsbuck, and others that were tagged cervid, as allowed by the rules for fictional species, are now tagged deer, which they're not supposed to be. These aliases are causing mistags, and cleaning them up will really mess up with being able to search for these kinds of creatures.

It also seems odd to me to invalidate/alias away tags like cervid when canid, canine, felid, and feline can stay.

watsit said:
There have been casualties here. Posts with xerneas, sawsbuck, and others that were tagged cervid, as allowed by the rules for fictional species, are now tagged deer, which they're not supposed to be. These aliases are causing mistags, and cleaning them up will really mess up with being able to search for these kinds of creatures.

I personally don't believe anything here has even changed. The existing rule is that fictional species can imply families or orders but not individual species, and "deer" is just the common name for the Cervidae family, not an individual species.

faucet said:
I personally don't believe anything here has even changed. The existing rule is that fictional species can imply families or orders but not individual species, and "deer" is just the common name for the Cervidae family, not an individual species.

Cervids also include elk and moose, which people don't usually call deer. And you can say the same thing as fox, which is a the common name for the vulpes family, but it's treated as being close enough to a species that braixen, zoroark, and others aren't supposed to be tagged as it and should use canine/canid instead (the next level down that we have tags for; that was what I got my first record over, tagging a braixen with fox).

Besides which, it seems cervine is still valid, and cervine used to implicate cervid. It would make more sense to have aliased cervid to cervine instead of deer. But as it is, this is like aliasing canid to dog or felid to cat, and it's really messed up the tags on a lot of posts.

watsit said:
And you can say the same thing as fox, which is a the common name for the vulpes family, but it's treated as being close enough to a species that braixen, zoroark, and others aren't supposed to be tagged as it and should use canine/canid instead (the next level down that we have tags for; that was what I got my first record over, tagging a braixen with fox).

Well, technically Vulpes is actually a genus in the Caninae subfamily...

I don't know. I don't really like this rule at all, it seems entirely against the point of TWYS as a concept to begin with, if it looks like something it should be tagged as that thing IMO.

For an example Sprigatito is literally just a green cat. Anybody who looks at it would think it's a cat.

post #3697196 post #3746362 post #3705530 post #3229533

We're not allowed to tag it as a cat because that breaks the rules of how to tag fictional species. Anybody who wants to search for cats are now unable to see this green cat unless they specifically include it in their search. Anybody who hates cats and does not want to see one ever will still see Sprigatito because according to our tagging system, it's not a cat.

If this was somebody's OC with some made up species we would just ignore whatever silly name they gave it and tag it as a cat. But for some reason species from large franchises get an entirely different treatment.

Then we've got the new gen 9 pokémon which is virtually indistinguishable from a real flamingo.... No fancy markings or unique body parts, just a flamingo. But the current rules would have us tag it with bird or avian instead of flamingo.

faucet said:
We're not allowed to tag it as a cat because that breaks the rules of how to tag fictional species.

It doesn't help that cat is aliased to domestic_cat and dog to domestic_dog, which is quite a bit more specific than people can mean by cat or dog. Resulting in incineroar and zeraora being mistagged as domestic_cat by people tagging cat, and lucario and the lycanrocs being mistagged as domestic_dog by people tagging dog. Feline and canine (or felid and canid) would've made more sense to me as an alias target.

The bulk update request #3659 (forum #351519) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3660 (forum #351520) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3649 (forum #351478) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3667 is active.

remove alias dolphin (12850) -> delphinoid (0)
remove implication delphinoid (0) -> toothed_whale (13121)
remove implication oceanic_dolphin (12099) -> delphinoid (0)
remove implication monodontid (421) -> delphinoid (0)
remove implication porpoise (40) -> delphinoid (0)
remove implication river_dolphin (24) -> delphinoid (0)

Reason: Unaliasing dolphin from delphinoid. Per Wikipedia :

Dolphin species belong to the families Delphinidae (the oceanic dolphins), Platanistidae (the Indian river dolphins), Iniidae (the New World river dolphins), Pontoporiidae (the brackish dolphins), and the extinct Lipotidae (baiji or Chinese river dolphin).

So part 2 will involve a series of implications and aliasing delphinoid to oceanic_dolphin (judging by Wikipedia, they're synonymous)

The day of reckoning has come o.o

faucet said:

Well, technically Vulpes is actually a genus in the Caninae subfamily...

I don't know. I don't really like this rule at all, it seems entirely against the point of TWYS as a concept to begin with, if it looks like something it should be tagged as that thing IMO.

For an example Sprigatito is literally just a green cat. Anybody who looks at it would think it's a cat.

post #3697196 post #3746362 post #3705530 post #3229533

We're not allowed to tag it as a cat because that breaks the rules of how to tag fictional species. Anybody who wants to search for cats are now unable to see this green cat unless they specifically include it in their search. Anybody who hates cats and does not want to see one ever will still see Sprigatito because according to our tagging system, it's not a cat.

If this was somebody's OC with some made up species we would just ignore whatever silly name they gave it and tag it as a cat. But for some reason species from large franchises get an entirely different treatment.

Then we've got the new gen 9 pokémon which is virtually indistinguishable from a real flamingo.... No fancy markings or unique body parts, just a flamingo. But the current rules would have us tag it with bird or avian instead of flamingo.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. This rule could definitely use a rework, the staff should probably have a discussion about it

The bulk update request #3647 (forum #351476) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3667 (forum #351633) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

The bulk update request #3671 is active.

create implication dolphin (12850) -> toothed_whale (13121)
create implication oceanic_dolphin (12099) -> dolphin (12850)
create implication monodontid (421) -> dolphin (12850)
create implication porpoise (40) -> dolphin (12850)
create implication river_dolphin (24) -> dolphin (12850)
create alias delphinoid (0) -> oceanic_dolphin (12099)

Reason: delphinoid and dolphin

EDIT: The bulk update request #3671 (forum #351718) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

I was wondering why my daily search for dolphin was suddenly empty, good to see it's just tags getting fixed up.

The bulk update request #3671 (forum #351718) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

faucet said:
I don't really like this rule at all, it seems entirely against the point of TWYS as a concept to begin with, if it looks like something it should be tagged as that thing IMO.

For an example Sprigatito is literally just a green cat. Anybody who looks at it would think it's a cat.

If this was somebody's OC with some made up species we would just ignore whatever silly name they gave it and tag it as a cat.

Yes, this exception to TWYS has always been silly. But if it looks exactly like the real species you're allowed to tag the real species: forum #254362.

faucet said:
I don't know. I don't really like this rule at all, it seems entirely against the point of TWYS as a concept to begin with, if it looks like something it should be tagged as that thing IMO.

For an example Sprigatito is literally just a green cat. Anybody who looks at it would think it's a cat.

The problem is it doesn't always look quite like that thing. While you have examples like sprigatito that is obviously a cat, you have other examples like blaziken that's not obviously a chicken (but is avian), or stantler that's not obviously a deer (in the colloquial sense, it has a bit of moose in it). They can be drawn more chicken- or deer-like, but in their default form they don't look like that, so how would you set a line for tagging avian vs chicken, or cervine vs deer? Not to mention things like eevee which is a hodgepodge of cat, dog, and rabbit features. When does it stop looking merely feline, canine, or lagomorph, and become a cat, dog, or rabbit?

watsit said:
The problem is it doesn't always look quite like that thing. While you have examples like sprigatito that is obviously a cat, you have other examples like blaziken that's not obviously a chicken (but is avian), or stantler that's not obviously a deer (in the colloquial sense, it has a bit of moose in it). They can be drawn more chicken- or deer-like, but in their default form they don't look like that, so how would you set a line for tagging avian vs chicken, or cervine vs deer? Not to mention things like eevee which is a hodgepodge of cat, dog, and rabbit features. When does it stop looking merely feline, canine, or lagomorph, and become a cat, dog, or rabbit?

If it looks like the thing, you tag the thing. If it doesn't, you don't. That seems simple enough to me. People might argue about how much a thing looks like a thing, but we have those kinds of arguments all the time across the whole site for a variety of tags; Pokemon wouldn't be any special.

strikerman said:
If it looks like the thing, you tag the thing. If it doesn't, you don't. That seems simple enough to me.

Except now we're not talking about technicalities, where stantler may technically look like a cervid so can be tagged as it, but common language, where stantler looking like a deer is debatable. As it is, the way people think of and use the word "deer"/"cat"/etc doesn't always match the scientific meaning. Scientifically, deer and cervid may be interchangeable, but ask random people and you'll find plenty that consider elk and moose separate from deer, even though they're all cervids/"deer". So whether stantler "looks like" a deer depends, not only on how well the artist made it look like a cervid, but also on what the given person considers a "deer". Whether a pokemon "looks like" a given species can be vague enough on its own, but throw in the additional ambiguity of different people having different concepts of these common species names, and the problem becomes worse.

And if we're just going to fall back to the scientific meaning, what's the point of switching away from the scientific names and to the common names where it's just going to create ambiguity? At least with the scientific name, there was a clear objective basis for what it was referring to (the scientific classification), but with the common name you'll have different people thinking it refers to different things.

watsit said:
Except now we're not talking about technicalities, where stantler may technically look like a cervid so can be tagged as it, but common language, where stantler looking like a deer is debatable. As it is, the way people think of and use the word "deer"/"cat"/etc doesn't always match the scientific meaning. Scientifically, deer and cervid may be interchangeable, but ask random people and you'll find plenty that consider elk and moose separate from deer, even though they're all cervids/"deer". So whether stantler "looks like" a deer depends, not only on how well the artist made it look like a cervid, but also on what the given person considers a "deer". Whether a pokemon "looks like" a given species can be vague enough on its own, but throw in the additional ambiguity of different people having different concepts of these common species names, and the problem becomes worse.

And if we're just going to fall back to the scientific meaning, what's the point of switching away from the scientific names and to the common names where it's just going to create ambiguity? At least with the scientific name, there was a clear objective basis for what it was referring to (the scientific classification), but with the common name you'll have different people thinking it refers to different things.

Do people even know what these scientific classifications are in the first place, at least enough to use them with any sort of rigorous consistency besides "uhh kinda looks like a dog, tag canid"? Changing the name doesn't change anything. Also, if people are outright misinformed, just inform them. Take it as an opportunity to educate.

strikerman said:
Do people even know what these scientific classifications are in the first place, at least enough to use them with any sort of rigorous consistency besides "uhh kinda looks like a dog, tag canid"?

They know enough at least to not restrict "canid" to only what they think of as dogs. They understand it well enough to know domestic dogs, wolves, and foxes fall under canid, even if they don't know exactly what it means. Similarly, people seem to understand that tags like cervid encompass more than what they may think of as "deer", yet will end up confused as to why animals that don't match the common perception of deer is being tagged as it.

strikerman said:
Also, if people are outright misinformed, just inform them. Take it as an opportunity to educate.

It's like the word theory. The scientific meaning and social meaning are different, but using the scientific meaning when the public is going to interpret it as the social meaning is only going to cause confusion. Education will only get you so far, and there's only so much a few people on a random furry image board will be able to do about the public's understanding of these words (nor do we necessarily want to harmonize the two meanings, since there's value in the way the public uses it to express their meaning, even if it can't be defined scientifically that way). It would be best to acknowledge using the scientific meaning in a social context will cause confusion and try to fix it.

watsit said:
Similarly, people seem to understand that tags like cervid encompass more than what they may think of as "deer", yet will end up confused as to why animals that don't match the common perception of deer is being tagged as it.

gonna be completely honest, i think you're giving people too much credit

Hi everyone, I noticed "bat" is not aliased to "bat_(species)" which is arguably worse and perhaps just an oversight as a part of this change.

I've opened an alias change but feel free to close it if action is taken as a part of this thread instead. https://e621.net/forum_topics/36399

The tag implication giant_otter -> otter has been rejected by @furrypickle.

The tag implication lutra -> otter has been rejected by @furrypickle.

The tag implication lontra -> otter has been rejected by @furrypickle.

[To clarify: those three got stuck in processing because they were redundant. They already imply otter via river_otter. So 'rejecting' them here is mostly a technicality. They're already part of an implication chain that connects them a little less directly. That's all.]

The tag implication cervine -> deer has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.

Is cervine gonna be renamed to old_world_deer?