I'm revising some species wikis and I noticed there's a good amount of just plain unused subspecies tags.
An example of an offender is raccoon_dog. On that page five subspecies are named. Only two tags have any images in them and one of those has a single image.
In the real world these subspecies are mostly defined by genetics and range with minor morphological differences that, when translated to art could be mistaken for style or character differences. To further confuse things, the tag for one of these subspecies, tanuki, is used as a synonym for the species as a whole.
Now in the real world subspecies distinctions like this are important for conservation, which is why they exist and why they are often hotly debated (and in this example the Japanese subspecies is debated to be its own species) and change frequently. Here, where we use common names and put horse dicks on everything, this doesn't seem totally relevant. Where possible, I feel like a lot of these subspecies tags could be merged together, aliased to their main species tag, or have the links to their empty wikis silently removed. Some subspecies like the wolf and brown_bear ones will definitely need discussion and a more thoughtful approach. But if there's a big demand to keep these (largely unused, sometimes confusing) tags, I'll leave it alone.

I personally see no issue with little-used species tags as long as they are correct. Species are TWYK (within reason) so it's ok that the visual morphological differences are minor.

For raccoon dogs in particular, the Japanese raccoon dog or tanuki and the common or Chinese raccoon dog are currently considered separate species, not subspecies.

wandering_spaniel said:
I personally see no issue with little-used species tags as long as they are correct. Species are TWYK (within reason) so it's ok that the visual morphological differences are minor.

For raccoon dogs in particular, the Japanese raccoon dog or tanuki and the common or Chinese raccoon dog are currently considered separate species, not subspecies.

Problem is that many of them are completely unused. And there is sometimes significant overlap with 'common name used to refer to the whole species' and 'subspecies name'. In this case 'tanuki' is a common name that is used to refer to the species as a whole (or to both species, depending on where you fall on the 'lumper-splitter' spectrum) which means many characters who would be generic 'raccoon dogs' get tagged tanuki. This is also an issue with 'grizzly bear' and 'timber wolf.' You could go and check the character references or ask everyone with a character tagged 'tanuki' if they meant the Japanese animal or just 'raccoon dog' but imo it is not worth it.

Eta:
I have a couple specific issues with these tags.

One is that they're not future-proof. Subspecies get split, merged, and defined all the time. It is hard to keep up to date, especially when not all of the proposed changes are valid. Doing this for a bunch of empty tags is not rewarding work.

You can avoid this, at least temporarily, by using a reference like Mammal Species of the World, but the current edition was released in 2005, and is quite out of date. An update was supposed to be published in 2019, but that didn't happen.

More than that though- it's messy and it sets an annoying precedent. There currently aren't subspecies tags for coyote, but there are 19 recognized subspecies. That would be a big list to drop on the coyote page, and the canid and canine pages are already huge messes.

It would grow the species tag list exponentially. Most furry-popular species have at least two subspecies. The white-tailed_deer has around forty subspecies.

This is good information for a character sheet or a description. It's not great for tagging or wiki maintenance. It's a lot of extra work with no
payoff.

regsmutt said:
Problem is that many of them are completely unused. And there is sometimes significant overlap with 'common name used to refer to the whole species' and 'subspecies name'. In this case 'tanuki' is a common name that is used to refer to the species as a whole (or to both species, depending on where you fall on the 'lumper-splitter' spectrum) which means many characters who would be generic 'raccoon dogs' get tagged tanuki. This is also an issue with 'grizzly bear' and 'timber wolf.' You could go and check the character references or ask everyone with a character tagged 'tanuki' if they meant the Japanese animal or just 'raccoon dog' but imo it is not worth it.

Eta:
I have a couple specific issues with these tags.

One is that they're not future-proof. Subspecies get split, merged, and defined all the time. It is hard to keep up to date, especially when not all of the proposed changes are valid. Doing this for a bunch of empty tags is not rewarding work.

You can avoid this, at least temporarily, by using a reference like Mammal Species of the World, but the current edition was released in 2005, and is quite out of date. An update was supposed to be published in 2019, but that didn't happen.

More than that though- it's messy and it sets an annoying precedent. There currently aren't subspecies tags for coyote, but there are 19 recognized subspecies. That would be a big list to drop on the coyote page, and the canid and canine pages are already huge messes.

It would grow the species tag list exponentially. Most furry-popular species have at least two subspecies. The white-tailed_deer has around forty subspecies.

This is good information for a character sheet or a description. It's not great for tagging or wiki maintenance. It's a lot of extra work with no
payoff.

I mean I suppose we could limit taxonomy tags to the species level. But I'd want it to be consistent - we'd need to get rid of all subspecies-level tags, including more frequently used ones like grizzly_bear.

(Still wouldn't apply to the tanuki and chinese raccoon dog though, since Wikipedia considers them separate species. I prefer to defer to Wikipedia for issues like this since Wikipedia editors tend to be very knowledgeable and invested on the subjects they edit, and we might as well let them have these arguments for us, lol)

wandering_spaniel said:
I mean I suppose we could limit taxonomy tags to the species level. But I'd want it to be consistent - we'd need to get rid of all subspecies-level tags, including more frequently used ones like grizzly_bear.

(Still wouldn't apply to the tanuki and chinese raccoon dog though, since Wikipedia considers them separate species. I prefer to defer to Wikipedia for issues like this since Wikipedia editors tend to be very knowledgeable and invested on the subjects they edit, and we might as well let them have these arguments for us, lol)

I think there's some value in subspecies that are treated differently than the rest of the species or that are debated as being their own species. Domestic dogs, wolves, and dingos come to mind. They get lumped and split differently every few years. It's an interesting puzzle for taxonomists, but for art? Eh.

Grizzly_bear is kind of a problem term because, in the US at least, "grizzly bear" is commonly used synonymously with "brown bear." You'll see "grizzly" thrown into subspecies names it doesn't belong in to give you things like "Kodiak grizzly" or "Siberian grizzly."

Which loops back to the tanuki problem. You have a proposed species split. The split occurs at a point where e6 uses two different common names. Because both names have been used interchangeably to refer to the species/species group as a whole, separating them presents a problem. So. What do? Lump em all together because the tags have been used interchangeably? Try to sift them out for accuracy? Idk I'm just a pervert.

I don't personally feel a need to weigh in on the debate, though some of the articles cited do not say what their citations say they do. I'd have to look into that further and potentially correct the article myself lol.