The tag alias #66261 colored -> colored_(disambiguation) has been rejected.

Reason: The tag name is too broad and vague. It no longer serves it’s original purpose and is on the way to become -black_and_white -greyscale.

The disambiguation would point towards the following tags:

EDIT: The tag alias colored -> colored_(disambiguation) (forum #390217) has been rejected by @slyroon.

What's the issue with the colored tag?

oopsitripped said:
What's the issue with the colored tag?

we have discussed at topic #42445 that colored tag is very mistagged and misunderstood by what wiki says in contrary and the ambiguity nature of it. colored posts is essentially a default form of post in the same way the 2d artwork is, contrary to monochrome and 3d_(artwork), supported by the topic #36632 by making 2d_(artwork) an invalid tag.

Please do not dump 55K posts into a disambiguation tag like that helps lol. No one will make a dent in that, and the work would be pretty low value as is colored with its current tagging.

At minimum, colored should be emptied first, perhaps first checking colored isparent:true for the few posts that followed colored's original intended use and populating some has_uncolored_version kind of tag. Even that doesn't seem worth the effort because the search wouldn't show the uncolored child posts (and like 99% of colored does not follow the original definition). Much easier to start from zero on isparent:true ~sketch ~line_art ~monochrome that seems to give better results. And none of the suggested disambiguation tags come close to fulfilling that purpose, not even colored-in with its current definition of "looks bucket fill-able."

I'm not sure why anyone would even want to search for has_uncolored_version anyway, but at least a tag makes those posts easy to find. Sigh... I don't know why we should care about this anymore. I think I'd rather fully invalidate this tag.

But that isn't and has never been what the wiki says? I'm sure this was established and agreed upon among the user base at some point, but for the last twelve years the wiki merely mentions that it's usually tagged on colored versions. There's no prescriptive guidelines given.

I would argue that colored is not a default, but even if it is, that doesn't make it pointless. It's worth keeping colored art findable because many people prefer it.
Determining tags for uncolored art is significantly harder than colored art and separating them for searching or tagging would become even harder if the colored tag were to be nuked. Simply adding colored to a search is preferable to finding and negating all the alternatives.
Generally, the kind of person who doesn't wanna see uncolored art because it's "unfinished" or "low quality" is not the kind of person who's willing to find out what all the tags for "uncolored" are.
The various uncolored tags also have more limited use. Very few people care which hue a monochrome piece is in or are searching specifically for spot color.

There's already 55k posts in the tag. There's already a seperate tag started for colored-in versions. While you can get the same utility out of the opposite tags, it's more cumbersome. Why throw the tag away instead of just changing the definition?

oopsitripped said:

Simply adding colored to a search is preferable to finding and negating all the alternatives.
[...]
There's already 55k posts in the tag. There's already a seperate tag started for colored-in versions.

A majority of the posts on e621 are what you defined colored as, it's practically the default. This means that the tag, with its 55k posts, is severely undertagged and you can't add colored to the search to get most of the colored posts. It is much better to just negate the tags which are effectively equivalent to uncolored

oopsitripped said:
But that isn't and has never been what the wiki says? I'm sure this was established and agreed upon among the user base at some point, but for the last twelve years the wiki merely mentions that it's usually tagged on colored versions. There's no prescriptive guidelines given.

The word "usually" is throwing you off. All I'm seeing is that someone saw this tag being used and tried to write an easy definition that fit the usage, which by the way is a terrible way of writing a wiki (garbage in -> garbage out). "Intended use" was probably an overstatement. "Original, common use" may be more accurate. Common in 2011. I highly doubt anyone had cared enough to ensure that remained the common use either.

I can tell you my 2011 thought process that appreciated the idea of has_uncolored_version. Art was a lot worse back then. We had lots of sketches and line art. Lots of unfinished stuff dumped onto the site. Without color, a lot of it was lifeless. And the better, more promising sketches made you imagine how good the art could look when colored, almost like you'd been cheated. Sometimes those sketches would get color_edits, a tag which did not exist back then and did not see significant use until more recently, this being another reason for colored's existence. And sometimes the artist would actually finish the sketch with color, but because we were very disorganized back then with users uploading art from anywhere, we often didn't even know the artist or have a source link to their gallery. So the colored tag was a way of saying, "hey, that art you glossed over a few months or years ago? Check again, you might like it now."

That explanation is probably the best rationale anyone has ever given on this site to justify a has_uncolored_version tag, like by a country mile, but that reason is still very outmoded. That no one seems able to intuit that reason anymore is very damning for any has_uncolored_version tag's existence. But this probably has not been colored's common use for close to a decade, certainly not after the advent of autocomplete, where people learn their tags instead of wikis.

Colored's current use is just the most reductive interpretation of the word, which is nothing special. Once again, I do not want to add any more tags to my repertoire if they should apply to damn near everything I upload and tag yet I would never search that tag myself. Hardly a point when everyone can see if a post is colored from the thumbnail.

The tag alias colored -> colored_(disambiguation) (forum #390217) has been rejected by @slyroon.