If you search amaterasu, you get nothing.

If you search okami, you get nothing.

If you add either as tags, you get an ugly disambiguation tag that requires correction, instead of what the user clearly intended.

If someone unfamiliar with the site comes here and searches those tags to find Ammy, or even the game itself, the fact that they are just lead to a brick wall may lead to frustration or confusion. And if they are posting, they are leaving erroneous tags that require cleanup.

I've been out of the alias/ implication game for awhile, but surely there's a smarter way to do these? Are there more like this?

Just realized Loona has 1 tag. Not the search-friendly place I remember.

I don't think we've had any complaints like this since the quick-complete dropdown has been added. the most populated tags already show up while typing a tag in; you can just type in "amat" and hit tab and amaterasu_(okami) is right there.

Whoa, haven't seen you here in over half a decade! Anyways, "okami" is really just "ookami", which can be "wolf" or "god" in Japanese (but you already knew that, or at least the "wolf" part based on your username), and Amaterasu is apparently the goddess of the sun in Japanese mythology. Due to the genericness of these names, they could even be character/artist names. So, instead we use okami_(capcom) and amaterasu_(okami) for what you're looking for, and create aliases to disambiguation pages okami -> okami_(disambiguation) and amaterasu -> amaterasu_(disambiguation). Another example of this is you have to search bolt_(bolt) and not just bolt, since "bolt" could be a type of fastener used with a nut or a bolt of lightning. It can get a bit annoying, if you forget or don't know and just search "bolt" or "amaterasu", but there's also auto-complete now as dba afish mentioned, so that helps.

Structurally it obviously makes sense to split tags with multiple meanings, or everything ends up lumped into one tag that's almost impossible to filter to what you actually want. In the staff's infinite wisdom pool was unaliased from pool_(disambiguation) and now it's got 2000 posts, despite not being the correct tag (swimming_pool) - depending on how you search you miss either 20% or 80% of the posts identified as a swimming pool. If it only came up with one or two results that hadn't been recategorised yet, people would notice something is up and (possibly struggle) to find the correct tag.

Pretty much the worst thing about this is sometimes disambiguation pages are created without actually having a wiki page associated with it, which should really not be done. Shoutout to dba afish for creating amaterasu_(disambiguation) right now because it previously didn't exist.

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Functionally? The site leaves a lot to be desired (I briefly touched on this in forum #345131) especially in regards to communicating it to the user. Autocomplete is a big help in finding the correct tag, but it's not always the solution. The whole disambiguation tag system was somewhat inspired by how Wikipedia does it, but we're missing one key part that Wikipedia does, the site should at minimum be alerting you that you're searching for a tag in the invalid category at the top of the page.

If this appeared at the top of the page after searching - would anybody be left confused at all?

You searched for amaterasu, an ambiguous tag. For the Okami character, see amaterasu_(okami). For other uses, see amaterasu_(disambiguation).

You searched for maxine, an ambiguous tag. For other uses, see maxine_(disambiguation).

We could even be as bold as to assume what people are searching for in some cases and return results for that without needing to make them search again, similar to how Wolfram|Alpha handles input.

Assuming "loona" is loona_(helluva_boss), a Helluva Boss character. For other uses, see loona_(disambiguation).

Assuming "pool" is a swimming_pool. For the game, see billiards. For other uses, see pool_(disambiguation).

faucet said:
Shoutout to dba afish for creating amaterasu_(disambiguation) right now because it previously didn't exist.

having empty wikipages for disambiguation tags is extremely bad. we really ought to make an effort to clean out this list. I didn't realize the absolute _scale_ of the problem until I took a look just now; nearly 1800 blank invalid tags, more than 3/4ths of which are disambigs.

EDIT: there's more blanks than not, even!

dba_afish said:
having empty wikipages for disambiguation tags is extremely bad. we really ought to make an effort to clean out this list. I didn't realize the absolute _scale_ of the problem until I took a look just now; nearly 1800 blank invalid tags, more than 3/4ths of which are disambigs.

EDIT: there's more blanks than not, even!

It's in a pretty bad state, but on the plus side many of these are just tags like joe_(disambiguation), which the wiki page is likely never going to be that useful anyway. Usually whenever creating disambiguation pages for generic first names I'll just list a few of the top tags and then link to the search results for joe* and joe_* since those are actually dynamic.

I'll create some in my spare time.

dba_afish said:
having empty wikipages for disambiguation tags is extremely bad. we really ought to make an effort to clean out this list. I didn't realize the absolute _scale_ of the problem until I took a look just now; nearly 1800 blank invalid tags, more than 3/4ths of which are disambigs.

EDIT: there's more blanks than not, even!

In the wiki creators/AIBURers defense, I would like to point out that there's a reason for that

gattonero changed all the tags which ended with _(disambiguation) to invalid, whether or not they were a valid disambiguation tag. So some have gone through no AIBUR nor review and will not be known until we search them out. (I've brought up this example enough times for it to be counted as bullying)

That kinda explains why there are so many blank invalid tags, and why they're likely to be disambigs, and why there are so many blanks

snpthecat said:
gattonero changed all the tags which ended with _(disambiguation) to invalid, whether or not they were a valid disambiguation tag.

When would a _(disambiguation) not be Invalid? Either it's a "valid" disambiguation, and thus is invalid to use and needs fixing, or it's an "invalid" disambiguation and shouldn't be used, thus is invalid. In both cases, it should be in the Invalid category to indicate it's incorrect and needs fixing or clarification. All _(disambiguation) tags belong in the Invalid category, just as all _(artist) tags belong in the Artist category, etc. It having a blank wiki page doesn't make it not Invalid, it just means a wiki page needs to be written.

watsit said:
When would a _(disambiguation) not be Invalid? Either it's a "valid" disambiguation, and thus is invalid to use and needs fixing, or it's an "invalid" disambiguation and shouldn't be used, thus is invalid. In both cases, it should be in the Invalid category to indicate it's incorrect and needs fixing or clarification. All _(disambiguation) tags belong in the Invalid category, just as all _(artist) tags belong in the Artist category, etc. It having a blank wiki page doesn't make it not Invalid, it just means a wiki page needs to be written.

You wanna write a wiki page for pommyn64from_behind_(disambiguation), be my guest.

snpthecat said:
You wanna write a wiki page for pommyn64from_behind_(disambiguation), be my guest.

That's obviously an typo from the space between pommyn64 and from_behind_(disambiguation) getting accidentally removed (or someone typed pommyn64 while the cursor was on from_behind_(disambiguation), and missed adding a space). That doesn't need a wiki, but I don't see the problem with it being in the Invalid category. It's still a bad tag that shouldn't be used, it's still invalid. IIRC, a now-former staff liked the idea of making all tags that end in _(disambiguation) automatically go to the Invalid category (like how all tags that end in _(lore) automatically go to the Lore category), so that they wouldn't need manual changing. Short of that, some intrepid moderator(s) mass changing the category of all tags they see with the _(disambiguation) suffix is better than requiring several multipart BURs by users taking the effort to find each ambiguous tag to change the category of (and those links are just the tip of the iceberg, there's still plenty more). I don't see the problem?

Eh, usually rare typos or errors just get removed and have nothing done about them. For example it would be overkill to alias musclegutchicken or musclegutoverweight_male to musclegut or move them over to the invalid category