I haven't yet found a page with guidelines for this sort of thing. If there is one, point me to it and I'll go hide out in the hall of shame for a while for overlooking it.

When a tag can mean more than one (very distinct) thing, how do you go about using the tags properly? There are a few ways I've seen these collisions happening:

• An artist's name is also their character's name
• An artist or character's name is the same as a feature, object, or species
• A feature or marking has a descriptive term derived from another object (for example, rattle, mask, or socks)

I have seen (for example, socks_(marking)) instances where one of the items gets a specific parenthetical callout to distinguish it from other such items. If there were a general precedence order for this sort of thing under the tagging guidelines, it might be helpful.

(And, naturally, it's always a good idea to apply common sense, lest you say that a feature always needs to have the callout and then some bright artist decides to start going by "pussy" or something...)

If we have such a conflict, it's generally resolved by either adding _(character) or _(artist) to the end of the tag. Whichever one is least common gets the extra text, the more common one is left alone.

So if we get a new artist calling himself pussy, his artist tag will be pussy_(artist) and the pussy tag will be reserved for the genitals. But if we start getting art of a new character called blotch, they will be tagged as blotch_(character) because blotch is already an artist tag and is more common than the character.

tony311 said:
But if we start getting art of a new character called blotch, they will be tagged as blotch_(character) because blotch is already a character tag and is more common than the character.

*blotch is already an artist tag and is more common than the character.