Alright, so what's the deal with everything tagged fox and vulpine being re-tagged as canine? I usually don't mind, but the artwork I've posted with me in it has been modified with the tag "canine" when there are clearly no canines present. I can't even remove the canine tag for some reason, either.

Here is a wikipedia entry for vulpines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulpine

It explains that while vulpine are of the family Canidae, they are of the tribe Vulpini, whereas things like dogs are of a sub-family canis. So canis and vulpini are not the same thing; ergo, canine and vulpine are different.

We have it that way because it's just simpler and there's probably a grand total of about two people on the site who would even care. Instead of having a bunch of convoluted Latin phrases as tags and requiring everyone be a Biology professor to search and tag correctly, we simplify it and group all of the "carnivorous, four-legged, dog-like" animals into one, simple-to-remember, almost-correct tag. It's just simpler.

Also, the reason you can't remove the canine tag is because when the fox tag exists, the canine tag is automatically added.

Except canines and vulpines are two completely different things. If you're going to split hairs like that, why have canine at all? I would be just as happy to not have the canine tag and have a fox tag, rather than have a vulpine tag instead of a canine tag.

So what I'm saying is, why not either add a vulpine tag or get rid of the canine tag being put on automatically. Leaving it the way it is means that countless images are tagged incorrectly.

to "split hairs" is to obsess over minute details

the only person here who is splitting hairs is named "darkfoxfurre"

while technically the term for a member of family canidae is "canid," it is much easier to refer to foxes, wolves, jackals, coyotes and dogs as "canine" because that is the term that everyone knows and uses for them

if you want to tag every image on e621 by the phyla, subphyla, classes, orders, families, genera and species contained in each image, be our guest

but for most high-functioning humans, foxes, wolves, jackals and coyotes are close enough to "canines" that they may be be a) easily identified, b) clearly identified and c) easily searched for, which is all the functions tags are supposed to serve anyway

if it still bothers you, just every time you see the word "canine" tagged on an image imagine it says "canid" instead

It's that way to make tagging better. We don't tag for correctness, we tag for usability. Just like the girls with hidden penises being tagged female and not herm.

samrien said:
to "split hairs" is to obsess over minute details

the only person here who is splitting hairs is named "darkfoxfurre"

while technically the term for a member of family canidae is "canid," it is much easier to refer to foxes, wolves, jackals, coyotes and dogs as "canine" because that is the term that everyone knows and uses for them

if you want to tag every image on e621 by the phyla, subphyla, classes, orders, families, genera and species contained in each image, be our guest

but for most high-functioning humans, foxes, wolves, jackals and coyotes are close enough to "canines" that they may be be a) easily identified, b) clearly identified and c) easily searched for, which is all the functions tags are supposed to serve anyway

if it still bothers you, just every time you see the word "canine" tagged on an image imagine it says "canid" instead

I lol'd. +10

So then why not change canine to canid if canid is more accurate to begin with? Is there a specific reason that this needs to remain completely incorrect? Because I see no "usability" advantage on putting the wrong tag on things. As for the whole girls with the hidden penises scenario, I was under the impression that such a case was determined by what the artist themselves would rule it as. Such as, if it's a known herm then why not tag it as herm? Taging the same character as herm in one case and female in the other case would make finding art of that type even more difficult. In which case "usability" is actually impaired.

darkfoxfurre said:
So then why not change canine to canid if canid is more accurate to begin with?

people are more likely to associate the word "canine" with canids because "canine" is used that way conversationally

further, the "dog" tag already exists for characters that are 'canine' rather than 'canid,' and if you're Average Joe Furry looking for a picture of a dog character whose name you don't know, the first tag you're likely to search is "dog," not "canine"

I totally get what it is you are trying to say here, darkfoxfurre, but it's just a status quo thing. while e621's tag system does not enforce complete scientific nomenclatural accuracy, it does let you search "dog" and find pictures of "dogs"

if you couldn't find pictures of "dogs" by searching "dog" then we would have a much more fundamental problem than foxes being tagged as canINES when they are really caNIDS. understand?

The deal here is that it grinds my gears that it automatically tags vulpine pictures incorrectly as canine. Furthermore once it's automatically tagged as such I can't manually change it. Furthermore, searching for vulpine and searching for canine renders two different sets of results.

Also, it further encourages the idiosyncrasy that a good 95% of people seem to have that foxes are indeed canines.

I'm not asking for complete 100% scientific accuracy here, just wanting to get rid of the complete 100% scientific inaccuracy.

you can't change it 'cause it's really not as big a deal as you're making it out to be

foxes are close enough to canines, the tag "fox" implies "canine" and that is probably not going to change

post #45944

darkfoxfurre said:
So then why not change canine to canid if canid is more accurate to begin with?

We have feline, equine, bovine, cervine, lapine, urine... (okay, maybe that last one isn't related)

Foxes are not "close enough" to canines. It's like calling a hotdog a hamburger. Sure they could originate from something similar but they are totally different things. It couldn't be more than a simple sql query to the db to change canine to canid. Or how about instead of changing it, just make it so when someone tags something as fox it not only triggers canine as a tag, but vulpine as well. There's a thousand ways to handle this that all take less than thirty seconds to implement. With the speed of the traffic on this site if this issue were properly handled to begin with it would have been fixed within the first ten minutes of this topic being created.

Vulpes is a genus within the subfamily Caninae, which is within the family Canidae. Thus, foxes are vulpine, canine, and canids.

darkfoxfurre maybe you haven't picked up on this but for the purposes of this website, yes they are close enough to canine

and it's only an issue to you

nobody else cares

grow up, man

samrien said:
darkfoxfurre maybe you haven't picked up on this but for the purposes of this website, yes they are close enough to canine

and it's only an issue to you

nobody else cares

grow up, man

this, this, this.

I care exactly enough to post saying that I don't really care.

Just please don't tag them as scalies, or my blacklist will filter them out... and because that would be really stupid.

Aurali said:
It's that way to make tagging better. We don't tag for correctness, we tag for usability. Just like the girls with hidden penises being tagged female and not herm.

I disagree with e621's current tagging system in this regard. We must be able to come up with a way to have accurate, usable tags. Usability should not trump correctness.

(Didn't we already have this discussion at our staff meet?)

deadjackal said:
I disagree with e621's current tagging system in this regard. We must be able to come up with a way to have accurate, usable tags. Usability should not trump correctness.

(Didn't we already have this discussion at our staff meet?)

I'd like to agree with this.

Vulpes is a genus within the subfamily Caninae, which is within the family Canidae. Thus, foxes are vulpine, canine, and canids.

Vulpes and Canis are two different Genera under under the same sub-family Caninae. And in fact it appears that canine is specifically from the sub-family Caninae, rather than what I had initially thought that it was from Canis, which is the latin root Canine is derived from. Until I can figure out exactly which word Canine refers to (Either Caninae, or Canis) it appears I have egg on my face.

deadjackal said:
Usability should not trump correctness.

A good place to start would be artists, then, right? Does that mean we can stop aliasing dr_comet to kemono_inukai, and vice versa?
/threadhijack