According to the current wiki page, the colored tag is given to “Child Images of a Sketch or Line art, and indicates that it is a colored version of its parent.” When searching for posts tagged with colored, I’m rarely seeing any parent/child posts. There are a few posts here and there that still follow the above mentioned definition, but for most posts, it describes a colored artwork without a sketch/lineart parent.

Since the colored tag has been heavily misused (against how the wiki defines the tag), should we just edit the wiki page and redefine colored simply as an artwork with colors, or do we just keep the definition of colored as it is and try to fix the tags on as many posts as possible?

I think colored should be redefined. We don't tag image alts, since there's way too many ways an image can be an alternate of another and it's not always clear which is the alt (is the one with the penis an alt of the SFW image, or the one without the penis an alt of the NSFW image? is the one with clothes an alt, or the one without clothes?). But even if we did, colored gives no hint to that meaning. It's like expecting people to think the line_art tag is for 'child images of sketched art', or to think sketch is for 'child images of lined or colored art'.

Perhaps instead of calling them alts, we could just call them versions.
"Colored_alt" implies the colorless one came first, which is usually the case, but you can't guarantee someone won't make a colorless_alt of a colored picture.

Calling tags things like:

• "colored_version" and "colorless_version".
• "safe_version" "questionable_version" "explicit_version"
• "cum_version"

and such, might be better, or worse, than calling things just alts.

m3g4p0n1 said:
Perhaps instead of calling them alts, we could just call them versions.

There's still way too many ways images can be made different. clothed, not clothed, bulge, penis, penetration, pussy juice, a little cum, a lot of cum, excessive cum, flaccid with cum, flaccid without cum, annoyed face, worried face, lustful face, small breasts, medium breasts, large breasts, small penis, medium penis, large penis, background, no background, dialog, no dialog, heart symbols, no heart symbols, less detailed, more detailed, extra characters, character A, character B, character C, ... there's many different ways a post can be different between versions, and trying to tag all these reasons would be an endless game. And when it's not terribly important information (if you're interested in X, search for X; how often is someone going to care if a post has X but another separate image doesn't?), that's a lot of work for little gain (if not negative gain by causing more problems with mistags than it actually helps anything).

Or we could just invalidate it on the basis that the sketch and line_art tags already exist and we don't tag non-exceptions, otherwise the list of mandatory tags for every image would probably satisfy the 10 general minimum on its own.

watsit said:
We don't tag image alts, since there's way too many ways an image can be an alternate of another and it's not always clear which is the alt (is the one with the penis an alt of the SFW image, or the one without the penis an alt of the NSFW image? is the one with clothes an alt, or the one without clothes?). But even if we did, colored gives no hint to that meaning. It's like expecting people to think the line_art tag is for 'child images of sketched art', or to think sketch is for 'child images of lined or colored art'.

Some would argue that an artwork always starts with a sketch/line-art version before a colored version. This is probably the reason why the colored tag is currently defined as such. However, you do have a valid point. Using tags to describe alts/versions would be redundant.

wat8548 said:
Or we could just invalidate it on the basis that the sketch and line_art tags already exist and we don't tag non-exceptions, otherwise the list of mandatory tags for every image would probably satisfy the 10 general minimum on its own.

That’s not a bad idea, although this approach might be a bit sketchy. pun fully intended *giggle* 🤭

There are posts of sketches and line art that are also colored. However, e621 has colored_sketch and colored_line_art tags that could fill in the blanks. Additionally, a lot of posts here that are ‘colored’ aren’t even tagged with the colored tag.

It does seem reasonable why colored would prove to be unnecessary, especially when tags like greyscale and sometimes even monochrome are used to describe artworks that aren’t colored.

zenith-pendragon said:
Some would argue that an artwork always starts with a sketch/line-art version before a colored version. This is probably the reason why the colored tag is currently defined as such. However, you do have a valid point. Using tags to describe alts/versions would be redundant.

That’s not a bad idea, although this approach might be a bit sketchy. pun fully intended *giggle* 🤭

There are posts of sketches and line art that are also colored. However, e621 has colored_sketch and colored_line_art tags that could fill in the blanks. Additionally, a lot of posts here that are ‘colored’ aren’t even tagged with the colored tag.

It does seem reasonable why colored would prove to be unnecessary, especially when tags like greyscale and sometimes even monochrome are used to describe artworks that aren’t colored.

Mentioning, been looking at this:
https://e621.net/posts?tags=black_and_white+-greyscale+ Soooooo many of those have shades of gray and not just black and white. I blame the term 'black and white' when referring to monitors and TVs. A robot could be scripted to retag the ones with too spread of colorspace (on a histogram)? XD