reason: Sorceress is a female sorcerer, and as a char tag shouldn't be force-aliased to the male version esp. if it's not that character.

Sorceress and sorcerer work because we don't have fox and vixen, or tom and queen tags.

BUT, you raise a decent point.

sorceror has 6 tags
wizard has 32
magician has 17
necromancer has 1
mage has 43

and those are all the other 'magic user' words I can think of

now, I'm sure the'res technically whole schools of difference between them.. but they should probably all be piled under one gender neutral tag.

Magic_user is probably the most catch_all

but I really like wizard myself XD

on the list of 'similar but maybe different':
There are 88 for witch, and 11 for warlock, 30 for shaman and 73 druid.

However, I'd argue that those MAY be visually distinct on their own to justify having unique tags. (especially druid because I bet those are all wow druids) --but I'm not looking at the tags at the moment.

warlock, shaman, and druid are probably all WoW related. Sorceress is an actual character name for a character in some game coming out- I have both the pictures favorited. Someone uploaded them, and made a comment about how he can't put the character tag for it because it just aliases to the character tag sorceror, which is incorrect. Now, as a -regular- tag, magic_user should be applied to them all, but the -character- tag Sorceress should be de-aliased (and the rest of them de-character tagged, if they are character tags; Unless the character's name is Shaman or Druid...). Thus this thread.

Then use sorceress_(character)

Sorceror shouldn't even -be- a character tag, though. It's not a "this is a character named Sorceror", it's a descriptor tag of "this is a sorceror" (misspelling sorcerer no less). Thus, de-alias, and de-character.

I agree with 123easy. The character from dragon's crown just just be labled 'dragon's crown' unless people actually say "hey sorceress, what are you doing there?" and that's her NAME.. then it's Sorceress_(Dragon's_crown)--considering the game was just announced a few days ago, it's a bit early to determine if that will be her name or just represents her class.

but I still think that all of the magic user tags ought to be lumped together. :p

witch needs a bit of tidying up, as the witch for left for dead has been tagged with that repeatedly (actually all of the left 4 dead characters could use indicators that they belong to L4d.. but that's a different topic)

warlock is a weird little commic and a few generic enouhg 'magic user' type images (some, yes, WoW)... I'd lump it in with the others, honestly.

Shaman and druid are visually unique enough to be 'worth' maintaining their own tags (different lore has different opinions on what or how a sorcerer or a wizard look different from each other.. but shaman and druid (which COULD possibly be lumped together, but I'd say no, because of WoW) tend to have a more natural 'tribal' bent.

I would get behind both implying whatever we decide for 'magic user' though, if people agree that one tag for all of them is a good idea.

magic_user as the metatag is most appropriate as they all use magic.

I was more thinking of a bunch of aliases rather then implications, honestly.... but implications work too :)

Magic_user, then? can anyone thins of something better?

Well... magic_user is the absolute most generic title you can use- I mean, it was the class name for wizards back in AD&D, after all. Shaman and Druid (And the occasional warlock) for WoW related images maybe should get _(WoW) or _(warcraft) added to them, as they are 'characters' in their own sense- in-universe they're the only ones that can do what they do- but this is only if there's a disagreement about naming them strictly magic_user. Everything else aliased to magic_user would be fine.

Also, do we have any Diablo II pics here? if so, there's precedent for a Sorceress character name. xP

well, the wow pictures already have world of warcraft or warcraft applied to them. so anyone wanting wow druids would just druid warcraft or druid -warcraft if they don't.

here's my idea, then...

also, unaliasing sorceress

Aliases:

sorceress is aliased to magic_user
sorceror is aliased to magic_user
wizard is aliased to magic_user
wizardess is aliased to magic_user (just in case)
magician is aliased to magic_user
necromancer is aliased to magic_user
mage is aliased to magic_user
enchanter is aliased to magic_user
enchantress is aliased to magic_user
magus is aliased to magic_user
warlock is aliased to magic_user
archmage is aliased to magic_user

Implications

shaman implicates magic_user
druid implicates magic_user

whew. did I miss anything? any objections?

Looks good to me, though if shaman and druid aren't getting warcraft added, they should just be aliased, imo.

oh! one I forgot: witch implicating magic user.

well.. I disagree.. alll of the things being aliased pretty much all kind of look alive. A robe, a staff, maybe a pointy hat, some fireballs that sort of thing. One man's wizard is anther man's mage is anothers sorcerer, is anothe'rs enchanter, etc.

Druids and shaman, though, are more tribal, nature magic type things.. and are likely to be decked out in bones and beads and loincloths.

just like a witch will brobably be in black with a pointy hat. they've got a different enough visual style to make it worth the extra tag.

I honestly kind of wonder if maybe all of them shoudl alias to, like, wizard (which is pretty gender nuetral), which implicates magic user...

Wizard is definitely gender-positive towards males. magic_user is completely gender-neutral.

Regardless of whether or not they fit a stereotype of long robes and a pointy hat, they still are magic users. Perhaps have shaman and druid imply tribal_magic, then alias them to magic_user after? Or *thinking how the system works* Alias them to tribal_magic and have tribal_magic imply magic_user.

wizard is gender neutral, if slightly inclined to male. wizardess doesn't exist as a tag :p wizard has like 40 I think?

and yes, they ARE all magic users, which is why shaman druid and witch all imply magic_user.

although thikning about it, searching for magic_user -shaman -druid -witch is awkward. There really does need to be another step in there somewhere. all of those alias to ... mage? wizard? arcane_caster? so, like, this:

wizard (etc) aliased to arcane_caster (or whatever), implies magic_user
druid implies tribal_magic (or whatever), implies magic_user

though I"m not sure what a 'witch' would be... anyway, this way, one can find all amgic user architypes easily. One can easily find robes and wizard hats OR skulls and beads... while still being able to find shapeshifting cat form critters and such.

also I guess magician shouldn't be included, as those are the funny guys on stage who pull rabits out of hats.

I dunno c_c;;

Sounds like you're starting to get a little complicated there :P

not really. the idea is to try and scoop all of the wizard and sorceror tags, make them one tag, which implies another tag.. to help keep different magic "flavors" separate.. no one wants to go through a bunch of boob-a-licious girls in black dresses when they're wanting face paint and loincloths XD

I like arcane_caster because that's mostly when those sorts of "classes" use..

but I guess tribal_magic is kind of awkward. maybe nature_magic.. or tribal_caster or... D:

Arcanist for the wizardly types, then? I'd almost say Vancian_Mage for Wizard and Sorcerer, but that's a reference to D&D, and subjective to boot. Nature_Magic might be viable for druids and shaman, but at the same time they aren't always directly casting magic... tribal_mage?

Arcanist is good, but maybe a lil vancian mage is a bit too D&d. I'm not that well versed in it and that one went over my head :)

maybe we ARE gettting too complicated, and are best off leaving it as just druid, shaman, witch and "wizard" and mentioning the others on the wiki via 'see also'

Well, they ARE all magic users. Then witches, warlocks, wizards, sorceresses, etc. are all arcanists (arcane magic users). Druids and shaman are tribal magic users. They are all accurate tags. I mean, if you want to look at panties, you search panties. If you want to look at magic users you search.... either a whole bunch of tags, or you look them up separately, currently. Just because there's not as many posts that would be tagged magic_user compared to panties (instead of the various sub-tags) doesn't mean it shouldn't be tagged.

As for Vancian Mage- Jack Vance was the man who created the magic system of spells/day and the rest for 8 hours uninterrupted to regain spell slots bit for D&D. Like I said, too subjective and referencial to D&D specifically, instead of generic.

tha'ts nifty to know, actually, the bit about Vance. :)

alright, so you and I agree, that:

Aliases

sorceress is aliased to arcanist
sorceror is aliased to arcanist
wizard is aliased to arcanist
wizardess is aliased to arcanist
magician is aliased to arcanist
necromancer is aliased to arcanist
mage is aliased to arcanist
enchanter is aliased to arcanist
enchantress is aliased to arcanist
magus is aliased to arcanist
warlock is aliased to arcanist
archmage is aliased to arcanist

Implications

shaman implicates tribal_magic
druid implicates tribal_magic
witch_doctor implicates tribal_magic

arcanist implicates magic_user
witch implicates magic_user
tribal_magic implicates magic_user

Sounds good.

I don't know, necromancer at the very least should be a separate tag, there's definite differences between a necromancer and your run-of-the-mill fireball-flinger. The others make sense I GUESS, there's not much of a difference between a wizard and a mage and a warlock. But the necromancer is pretty different, animating the dead and all.

"arcanist" sounds really obscure, seems to be a World of Warcraft term, or a Final Fantasy one (limited to just one race in one game?) Pretty... arcane term... if you ask me.

I much prefer magic_user, and making all the specific forms imply that. It doesn't sound particularly Vancian, and I've at least played AD&D.

Can't see how aliasing is anything other than a bad idea here. Let's not do that, we'd lose meaning by applying these aliases. Implications along the same lines without the weird term "arcanist" in the middle are probably harmless though.

In particular, magicians can be the bods with top hats and rabbits too. Skilled stage performers and misdirectors, not necessarily with flinging of actual magic powers.

post #136010
post #51370

and, yes:

post #12498

Here's my counterproposal.

"Western" / Vancian / Tolkien types

sorceress implies magic_user
sorceror implies magic_user
wizard implies magic_user
wizardess implies magic_user
magician implies magic_user # Ambiguous: rabbits, top hats
necromancer implies magic_user
mage implies magic_user
enchanter implies magic_user # romantic implications too (?arguable)
enchantress implies magic_user: # romantic implications too (?arguable)
magus implies magic_user
mage implies magic_user # this might be a good alternative for magic_user if that seems clumsy to anyone
archmage implies mage
alchemist implies chemist # maybe
alchemist implies magic_user # also maybe

Tribal / Ancient / Regional types

shaman implies tribal_magic_user # arguable, priest figure
druid implies tribal_magic_user # arguable, basically a priest in ancient times
witch_doctor implies tribal_magic_user # arguable, almost a priest
(loads more similar terms)
tribal_magic_user implies magic_user
witch implies magic_user # loose term, but magic use is implied
warlock implies magic_user # "male version of a witch" in some usage

I extended tribal_magic because we're not talking about a specific kind of whatever_magic here, just the users.

tony311 said:
I don't know, necromancer at the very least should be a separate tag, there's definite differences between a necromancer

This is actually a really good point. the one necromancer picture we HAVE isn't, but this is a pretty good point. (although ironically, our single necromancer image is holding a fireball... I may retag him..)

Anomynous said:
"arcanist" sounds really obscure, seems to be a World of Warcraft term, or a Final Fantasy one (limited to just one race in one game?) Pretty... arcane term... if you ask me.

it's not a wow term, dunno about FF.

I much prefer magic_user, and making all the specific forms imply that.

the problem with just making it 'magic_user' straight up is that to get jsut your robes and wizard hats, you have to search magic_user -tribal_magic -witch. The goal of "arcanist" was to make it so there was a single unified term for everyone of the "robe and wizard hat' type.

Can't see how aliasing is anything other than a bad idea here. Let's not do that, we'd lose meaning by applying these aliases.

I don't actually think we loose much meaning here...

about half of the 'enchanter' etc names don't actually have imaes in them, or only have one. it's more thesaurus stretching :P

Here's a selection of mostly random pictures taken from these tags:

post #141343 post #130562 post #136326 post #97788 post #78934 post #115691 post #127384 post #73353 post #71661 post #80479 post #61772

I really, in general, don't see much perceivable difference between them. Every setting and lore has it's own definition of what a wizard is and how it's different from a sorcerer and how THAT's different from a mage, etc. For the most part, things are kind of randomly tagged whatever comes to mind for the tagger first. Especialyl since the bulk of them are named 'wizard' I think.

Implications along the same lines without the weird term "arcanist" in the middle are probably harmless though.

I suppose implications could work instead... but what do you think of switching arcanist for 'wizard' instead and making them aliases?

In particular, magicians can be the bods with top hats and rabbits too. Skilled stage performers and misdirectors, not necessarily with flinging of actual magic powers.

this is true. I actually meant to remove magician from my last draft ^^;

Let's see.. yoru counter proposal...

enchanter/enchantress - these don't actually have any images yet. but I've always heard enchanter to be like 'he'll enchant you and turn you against your countrymen' or 'he enchants magic objects'

Mage *is* a good alternative to magic user, actually.

I don't want to play with alchemist becuase some are about magical potions and others are more about chemistry.. I'd leave them out :)

I like tribal_magic_user -- thank you.

I guess we could pull warlock out and put it in with witch, though most of the warlock images are... not anything one way or another.. but it's a minor detail.

... I would still prefer to get all of the 'robe and wizard hat' terms condensed into one tag, rather then 10 differnet ones. :)

Mage is shorthand for magician, which is based off Magus, defined as such:

1. A member of the Zoroastrian priestly caste of the Medes and Persians.
2. In the New Testament, one of the wise men from the East, traditionally held to be three, who traveled to Bethlehem to pay homage to the infant Jesus.
3. Sorcerer; magician.

and which meant "wise man" (as it was used for the title of Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior, aka the Three Magi or Three Wise Men).

Thus, it is either a) not gender neutral (going to its roots) or b) it defines sorcerer/magician, and not all arcanists are casters.

magic_user is generic, gender-neutral, and self-descriptive; a user of magic.

As for arcanist: it's not an FF term either. It means a practitioner of the arcane. Arcane magics are (usually) defined by their esoteric means, such as Aleister Crowley's magic circles, which use formulaic symbolism, to things such as the spell weaves from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, in that the energies must be put together exactly so, and the knowledge of how is restricted to the Aes Sedai, all the way down to witches crafting brews with simple rhyming couplets. However, it's also used as the term for magics which do not depend on natural sources- In other words, they aren't nature magic or spiritual magic or anything. Often this gets compared to a force of pure magic, thus arcanists are those with the closest ties to pure magic power... but I digress.

In short, arcanist isn't based in an FF term or D&D term. It means "One who practices the arcane", with arcane energy being magic in its most basic/purest form.

Witchcraft itself is the "use of supernatural or magical powers", which fits to magic_user exactly, without all the background Christian counter-belief baggage. Though, most of it was done with herbs and poutices and brews and the like, so tribal or nature magic would be more applicable, I guess.

Warlock is used in modern wicca as meaning a male witch (as Christians did historically), but in its original context among pagan communities it meant an oathbreaker or disruptor, ie; one who practiced forbidden magics. Use whichever version of the term you wish. Either way it fits into magic_user. Note that while a warlock may be a necromancer, a necromancer isn't necessarily a warlock. Many witches and other occultists communed witht he dead through forms of necromancy in historical texts; It was only the actual raising of the dead physically et al that was considered taboo by most sources.

Enchanter/enchantress: If it's just someone using feminine/masculine wiles to seduce someone and "enchant" them, there's the seduction tag. If it's magic that's involved, they're a magic_user.

Tribal magic user is appropriate even among those who are "priest" types, as priests are the religious caste of a people. If they perform religious rites for their people that involves magic, they are still performing a form of tribal magic.

Alchemy/alchemists started in the root of transmutation of one material to another, but its foundations are firmly in science, not magic. while there are some fantastical elements to it- lead to gold, for example- I don't think they apply to the magic_user tag.

everything I haven't covered looks fine to me, otherwise.

Mage may not, historically, be gender neutral, may, historically, not describe any of the other 'caster' types...

but we're not writing a dang dictionary hun. We're trying to he user friendly and mostly correct. The 'gay' tag isn't homosexual, and only applies to males, despite lesbians also being 'gay' by the general definition. but gay and lesbian are easier to type and allows for greater accuracy in searching.

In that same regard.. "mage" is understood these days as a magic user of any sort.

my 'current' thinking is

wizard etc, etc is aliased to mage, mage implies magic_user.

and it does not require anyone to have the english knowledge of the word 'arcanist' which could be easily misread or misunderstood, ESPECIALLY if english is not a primary language of the user. :) Yeah, this is an english website. Nothing, though, says we can't try to be friendly with it. :)

witchcraft doesn't need to be 'tribal' though. While you ARE correct in the method, we're talking about the visual idea. :) 'witch' can stand up well enough on it's own. the cultural idea of 'witch' is ingrained into us pretty strongly. Witch stands strongly wth the mental image it evokes. as illustrated by the fact that there are 88 witch images.

as far as warlock, this all is true, , but the 10 images warlock has are not particularly witchy..

As far as priests go, I purposefully didn't include cleric or priest in. Despite the fact that many of the images are clearly of magic users post #47424 post #127385, there are a scattered several that clear yo be, well, members of the clergy. post #19589 post #53273 ... (and even if I were to alias then, I'd say they would be holy_magic_users, BUT, the mundane clerics and priests prevent this from happening. They should be manually tagged.)

so, blahblahblah.. bottomline, how does this look?

wizard etc, etc is aliased to mage, mage implies magic_user
witches, necromancers, implying magic user
shaman, druid and witchdoctor implying tribal_magic_user
magicians not implying anything
holy_magic_user implying magic_user, but holy_magic_user is manually tagged on :P

rawr?

Looks good. Still disagree that mage should be the catch all.

Other term: spellcaster. It's fairly made-up too, though; "magic" is probably the neutral term for magic - divine, arcane or whatever, so it probably should be part of the term for a user of it.

Witch has quite a few meanings, from fun Halloween Sexy Witch costumes to the shit people in some parts of Africa get accused of and get killed for, via the old religions of Europe and reinvented Wicca. Broad term, but I guess it's ok to imply magic_user and hope taggers read the tags after tagging.

Implications vs. Aliases. Strongly suggest implications rather than aliases to avoid folding two tags into one where the two tags together give more meaning to the pic. Say you have an alias from "witch" to "magic user": applying it to

female, witch ---{alias applied}---> female, magic_user

which loses you some implicit information since the main stereotype is about wise old gals with black cats (here, at least). The result of applying the equivalent implication is:

female, witch ---{implication applied}---> female, witch, magic_user

which at least keeps the nuance in place for all that it's worth (not much really; see above). Aliases are really much more heavy-handed than implications.

Arcanist. Okay, I'll buy that it's not FFish or WoWish beyond a couple of fan wikis out there. But it seems to be an actual word: dictionary.com says for "arcanist":

–noun
a person professing special secret knowledge concerning ceramics, especially concerning the making of porcelain.

Heh, now there's a shading of meaning I didn't expect. Well, the method was pretty secret stuff (until the Europeans stole the recipe from the Chinese and/or discovered other ways of making it), and all "arcane" really means is "hidden", or "secret". So I suppose so. This sounds increasingly not-magical to me though.

SnowWolf said:
wizard etc, etc is aliased to mage, mage implies magic_user
witches, necromancers, implying magic user
shaman, druid and witchdoctor implying tribal_magic_user
magicians not implying anything
holy_magic_user implying magic_user, but holy_magic_user is manually tagged on :P

Doesn't alias witch to magic_user, just implies. Looks like we're all on the same page (even if I dissent a little, it's still better than how it currently is by far).

I kind of like spellcaster. what do you think, easy?

Witch has quite a few meanings, from fun Halloween Sexy Witch costumes to the shit people in some parts of Africa get accused of and get killed for

we tag visually, not off of meaning. A girl dressed up in a witchy costume gets tagged witch. Does she actually cast magic? who knows. Someone with skulls and beads would probably get tagged something else. is it linguistically accurate? not so much, but.. tag what ya see. in any event, 99% of witches should be 'fun party witches' if they're getting the tag... most uploaders won't go "ah, but, this, technically, is a XXXX-- you can tell because of the blue feathers, as opposed to red, and the golden beads."

Aliases are really much more heavy-handed than implications.

and that's why witches get an implication, while the other ones that are NOT distinct, get aliases. :)

hokay. ONE MOAR TIME.

Aliases

sorceress is aliased to spellcaster
sorceror is aliased to spellcaster
wizard is aliased to spellcaster
wizardess is aliased to spellcaster
mage is aliased to spellcaster
enchanter is aliased to spellcaster
enchantress is aliased to spellcaster
magus is aliased to spellcaster
warlock is aliased to spellcaster
archmage is aliased to spellcaster

Implications

necromancer implicates spellcaster

shaman implicates tribal_magic_user
druid implicates tribal_magic_user
witch_doctor implicates tribal_magic_user

spellcaster implicates magic_user
witch implicates magic_user
tribal_magic_user implicates magic_user
holy_magic_user implicates magic_user

magician is left alone, should be retagged so that non-rabbit/tophat characters

necro should implicate spellcaster. Otherwise, that all looks perfect to me. Spellcaster is not linguistically complex like arcanist, is gender neutral and unrelated to magus in a direct line, and it is a generic catchall that is appropriately descriptive.

For magician- perhaps stage_magician?

okay. I edited necro. Stage_magician isnt' a bad idea... but we'll worry about that one in a bit... let's get community approval for all of these, then.. yeah. :)

Ah, also- magic should imply magic_user, I think. Just for the cases where it's not obvious what a character is and so magic has been tagged, but no type of magic user has.

Shiiiiit... there are 600 magic pictures c_c

*adds another project to list*

that's a good one, though.

hmm.. *loosk through magic* lots of ponies.. floaty levitation, wand waving...glowybits.. yeah.*

one instance of the word magic, but I think that's a reasonable implication, though.

if there's one instance of the word magic, just re-tag it english_text, perhaps. It's what i do when i see people tagging all the words in a picture. -.- way too specific.

it depends.. some words? sure. others.. eeeh. but, yeah. I"m not tackling magic right now. I'll wait on implicating it until I get around to it. there's a LOT of work to be done 'round these parts D:

The following has been done:

I changed tribal_magic_user to tribal_spellcaster for consistency, ditto for holy_magic_user.

Aliases

sorceress is aliased to spellcaster
sorceror is aliased to spellcaster
wizard is aliased to spellcaster
wizardess is aliased to spellcaster
mage is aliased to spellcaster
enchanter is aliased to spellcaster
enchantress is aliased to spellcaster
magus is aliased to spellcaster
warlock is aliased to spellcaster
archmage is aliased to spellcaster

Implications

necromancer implicates spellcaster

shaman implicates tribal_spellcaster
druid implicates tribal_spellcaster
witch_doctor implicates tribal_spellcaster

spellcaster implicates magic_user
witch implicates magic_user
tribal_spellcaster implicates magic_user
holy_spellcaster implicates magic_user