Don't you just love it when one can of worms ( forum #49982 ) leads to an entirely different can of worms? "no_legs" is a very ambiguous tag, at least the way we're using it on this site, and with no wiki article to clarify exactly what it means it will remain ambiguous, doing multiple duty for entirely unrelated things.

It's being used in several ways, so far -- for amputees, for creatures which may or may not have legs (but we can't see them) and for images in which legs are implicated, but are simply out of the frame. Thus, people are extending the "tag what you see" rule to include "tag what you can't see". In the following images I can't see legs and someone has been kind enough to tell me this by tagging those images "no_legs".

post #98406

post #260010

post #260862

post #262525

post #262670

In the following image, the case is less clear, since the character could be an amputee or the artist might just have decided not to draw the legs. Since the actual leg stumps aren't visible, we don't know for certain.

post #256798

Then, there's this monstrosity (tagged as a "bat"), and I don't even know if it's supposed to normally have legs:

post #95378

In my opinion the only cases of a semi-valid "no_legs" tag in images that use this tag, are these:

post #142273

post #264200

This exhausts the "no_legs" tag on e621.

If we're going to be using this tag on images in which the lower part of the body is out of the frame or otherwise hidden (e.g. the driver of an automobile) then there are a LOT of images on this site which need the "no_legs" tag. You could logically extend that to include any creatures which don't normally have legs, as well as those which normally do but which are amputees or which were born without legs.

Warning -- Reductio ad absurdum argument follows: This would also imply that we need other "no_<fill in body part of your choice> tags to maintain consistency in telling people what they won't find if they use those tags. You know ... tags like "no_head", "no_arms", "no_genitals" ... that sort of thing.

My suggestions:

1) If you don't know that a character actually has no legs, then there's no point in tagging the image "no_legs". This is a simple corollary to the "tag what you see" rule. Namely ... "just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there".

2) It doesn't make sense to me to tag creatures that normally don't have legs with "no_legs".

3) If a creature normally has legs, but a particular instance of that creature doesn't have legs because they've been removed, then the image should be tagged "amputee". Medically, this covers surgical, traumatic, and congenital amputation.

4) I think the only valid use of "no_legs" is in the case of creatures which normally have legs, but you have an instance of one which, for whatever reason, was born without legs (e.g. thalidomide-induced phocomelia ). Unfortunately, I know of no image on this site in which this can be inferred from the image, itself. Therefore ...

5) The best route to take is to invalide the "no_legs" tag entirely.

Make it apply only to pictures with characters that are clearly amputees and remove it from those pictures that don't meet that criteria. Update the wiki to reflect this. Boom, done, no need for an essay.

I'm sorry you don't like reading in-depth explanations, Kclub, so if tldr: skip to the bottom of this post for a quickie nutshell.

The "essay", as you call it, is a description of the problem and many of its implications, now and down the road. I disagree that such descriptions aren't necessary when making major decisions regarding tagging conventions that are already in effect, whether those conventions are good or bad.

Perhaps you don't care to know the reasons for an opinion, but without those reasons clearly stated an opinion is just that -- a subjective evaluation with no factual support. It is, at least in my view, an invalid basis for arguing for a policy change.

As for your suggestion, amputation is not the only way (as I actually pointed out in instance #4) for a character to not have legs.

Furthermore, We also have have the tag "no_arms" for characters missing their arms, and that has properly been aliased to the tag "armless". And how about for characters missing only a single leg, seeing that "no_legs" is a plural and clearly implies that both legs for a biped, or all four legs for a quadruped, are missing? Do we have a "no_leg" tag for the singular case? Yes, we do, and it's applied to only a single image in which the legs of the characters are simply out of frame.

This is the reason I suggested that the best route is invalidate (yes, I spotted the misspelling) the "no_legs" tag. We already have "amputee" and "quadruple_amputee". At this point I think that's all we really need.

I'm sure the inconsistencies, here, are the result of the "construct by committees" approach to tagging on this site, with the committees in question not consulting with each other. That's the price we pay for having this site, since a handful of administrators couldn't possibly keep up with the tagging we need to make e621 successful as a image search engine. The user base can, and actually does, save for issues in which some people who are tagging images probably have no business doing so.

There are people, and I'm one of them, who are good at troubleshooting issues like this one, and I probably manage, in a short period of time, to discern more of them than the average person does. I'm not bragging about that, either. This sort of thing is not only in my blood, but I'm trained in seeing patterns and how things fit together (or fall apart, in this case). I've been doing this sort of thing in one venue or another for nigh on forty years. It took me far longer to write my "essay" than it did for me to discern those problems.

. . .

tldr: I think the issue with "no_legs" is far more complex than your simple, across-the-board solution would make it out to be.

Those were done by me, however. (The top ones)
Sorry for the, let's say, confusion I was making on the tag.
I still haven't gotten the rule up to my head as to what is on the image. All I can say, those were mistakes.

I was still looking for the "out of frame" related tags, and the only I found is the no_legs thing since the legs are out of the frame, you mentioned. Perhaps, I should stop being especial on the images I am doing so I won't confuse the tags, or maybe I could be careful, aware, or conscious on what the hell I'm doing while tagging based on what I am seeing.

Thanks for the explanation, Keats. Yeah ... tagging what you don't see isn't a good idea. There might be an image of Zig Zag in which you can't see her glorious tail (sacrilege, I know -- makes a note to offer a sacrifice to MBR later for suggesting such a thing), but you can't use a "no_tail" tag on that image unless it's been clearly amputated through surgery, accident, or as a joke by the artist.

Unfortunately, I don't think we have any "out of frame" tags. It would certainly be helpful to have several such tags (at least "legs_out_of_frame" and "head_out_of_frame"), since these features of an image could be instrumental in helping to locate specific images.

RedRaven said:
Unfortunately, I don't think we have any "out of frame" tags.

Well, that's unfortunate.

no_legs is now aliased to legless, following the no_arms -> armless precedent.

Do not use this tag to tag an image where the legs are out of frame. We don't tag what we don't see. This tag should only be used to indicate a character with visibly missing legs (and I'm not talking about things like nagas or mermaids or something that isn't supposed to have legs). If a character is obviously an amputee then that tag ought to be used as well.

Thanks, null ... closure at last on that one issue.

We still have a "no_arms" tag, though, and it clearly denotes characters which are missing arms. Shouldn't those, by extension, also be tagged with "amputation or amputee or something"? Like I said, above, this is actually a complex issue that affects more than just the "no_legs" tag, assuming at least one of the goals around here is consistency with the tagging procedures.

edit: Whoops! Did my post cross an edit you made? I could have sworn you said that you invalidated "no_legs". Anyway, I think this is a better solution, now.

no_arms has previously been aliased to armless and the same guidelines should be followed. We simply don't tag things that are not in an image such as out-of-frame body parts or the absence of a bra (that is why we don't use a no_bra tag).

amputee should, obviously, only be used when a character is clearly an amputee.