The bulk update request #4231 is pending approval.

remove implication color_edit (3668) -> colored (79760)
change category colored (79760) -> invalid

Reason: There are a few issues with the colored tag.

• 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, there are rarely any parent/child posts to be seen. There are a few posts here and there that still follow the above mentioned definition, but mostly, it’s just a colored artwork without a sketch/lineart parent. In short: the tag has been heavily misused.

• Tags like black_and_white, greyscale, and monochrome are used to describe artworks that aren’t ‘colored’, so having a tag that is an exception of the other tags seems unnecessary. Additionally, we have sketch and line_art tags that describe (mostly) colorless artworks. If they are colored, we just use the colored_sketch and colored_line_art tags instead.

After a bit of discussing on topic #36742, I think it’s safe to say that we should invalidate the colored tag. If anyone here disagrees or has some thoughts/ideas on what to do otherwise, please share them.

The tag's usage has changed from its original purpose to just "any image with color" - and if it's going to be used for that purpose it's only tagged on a tiny fraction of the colored images on e621.

You'd be much better off searching -monochrome to find colored images, which actually gets tagged by a bot if I recall correctly.

faucet said:
The tag's usage has changed from its original purpose to just "any image with color" - and if it's going to be used for that purpose it's only tagged on a tiny fraction of the colored images on e621.

You'd be much better off searching -monochrome to find colored images, which actually gets tagged by a bot if I recall correctly.

Indeed.

Unless someone is willing to edit thousands of colored artworks to add the colored tag (in accordance with a new definition) or write a bot that can recognize ‘colored’ posts, the tag doesn’t seem important anymore.

zenith-pendragon said:
Tags like black_and_white, greyscale, and monochrome are used to describe artworks that aren’t ‘colored’

Monochrome images can very much be colored:
post #3883942 post #3883574

Monochrome just indicates the use of a single color + it's shades (greyscale is just monochrome grey, but you can also have monochrome blue, monochrome pink, etc). Anyway, we don't have tags which "indicates that it is a[n alternate] version of its parent" for some random conception of "alternate", so that meaning of the tag makes absolutely no sense to stick with. Every tag like sketch, line_art, monochrome, greyscale, etc, would then need a tag that "indicates that it is a sketch/line_art/monochrome/greyscale/etc version of its parent". It would get very messy very fast.

Either the wiki should be changed to say it's for any image with (non-black/grey/white) color, or be invalidated and nuked (I pity who would have to edit the 34k posts that have the tag currently; if only we could make BURs with the nuke command), with the wiki changed to suggest color_edit for third-party edits adding color to a non-color image, and just don't tag it if the image simply has color.

I'm in camp "invalidate and nuke". Just another one of those tags which is precisely equivalent to the negation of another tag, applies to >90% of the site, and will either never be fully tagged or be too broad to be useful. -line_art is a perfectly good, and much more maintainable, substitute.