nuke animal

BUR #7228 has been rejected.

nuke animal

ref forum #188293

evazion said:

Animal in itself is a pretty useless tag. The only things that imply it are random tags that happen to contain the word animal, not any actual animals themselves. This makes no sense.

If you try to make it into an umbrella tag for all animals, then you quickly run into problems. Like do insects count as animals, or do fantasy creatures like dragons or RPG monsters count, or does it count when the animal is barely present, like a bird that's a tiny speck deep in the background? These are all signs the tag is too broad. We got rid of vehicle for similar reasons; it made no sense to have an umbrella tag for everything from bicycles to space craft.

Additionally, apparently we don't actually want to imply various animals to animal because we don't want to tag things like animal statues as animals. That means nobody actually uses the animal tag, ~bird ~cat ~dog ~bunny alone has like 30k of 120k posts tagged animal.

If we don't need a blanket tag for bikes and spaceships, surely we don't need one for butterflies and lions.

While I try to use the tag as much as possible (when tagging living animals) I can see why it would be a useless tag, so I'm on the fence about it.

I always tag posts with living animals with the animal tag as well, I don't think it's totally useless because of this factor:

A picture with a rabbit symbol would get tagged as bunny, but not as animal, that's why we don't imply specific animals to the animal tag. I could search bunny animal for pictures that depict actual living rabbits, or bunny -animal for other cases. Or maybe someone would want to search bestiality posts with animals, due to bestiality not being necessarily about animals but non-humanoid partners. I'm not entirely in favor of maintaining animal tag, but I think there's some usefullness to the tag.

Unbreakable said:

While I try to use the tag as much as possible (when tagging living animals) I can see why it would be a useless tag, so I'm on the fence about it.

Pretty much this. As our normal animal tags like cat or dog are pretty broad, it's good to have a tag for living animals. But it's not helpful to have a tag like that, that has no clear meaning and nobody is going to read the animal wiki.
It needs a better name and a start from scratch, if we want a real tag for living animals.

Guaro said:

Pretty much this. As our normal animal tags like cat or dog are pretty broad, it's good to have a tag for living animals. But it's not helpful to have a tag like that, that has no clear meaning and nobody is going to read the animal wiki.
It needs a better name and a start from scratch, if we want a real tag for living animals.

I kind of agree with this but don't think nuking the animal tag before setting up the new tag and populating it would be the way to go about it.

@FinetalPies please use topic #7713. I deleted the posts to avoid cluttering this topic. Also you don't need to use brackets in BUR forms.

It would be good to have a tag that says "this appears to be a normal animal" but I dont know how to name it intuitively.

This bulk update request is pending automatic rejection in 5 days.

Well if we don't want to nuke it we should at least make it useful. Right now it doesn't even get consistently tagged on posts with actual animals because no animal tags imply it.

It would require a restructuring of existing tags, such as creating tags like animal symbol and animal statue as well as bird statue and whatnot, until we're able to prune away all instances of non-living (and corpses, I guess...) animals in each individual animal tag.

As always, the work to fix it is the biggest hurdle to fixing it.

The utility is nil and nobody wants to clean it up but we're gonna end up keeping it anyway. Typical.

Opening 25 random posts with the animal tag didn't reveal a single mistagged post. It is actually pretty rare that this happens with general tags and the first time I've ever had it happen with a tag that someone has said is in need of cleaning up. Even things that looked like mistags at first glance turned out to be right.

If the issue is that there are posts that should have the tag but don't then... well, welcome to Danbooru I guess?

Going through cat -animal returned more things that didn't want the animal tag than that did.

This bulk update request has been rejected because it was not approved within 45 days.

The bulk update request #7228 (forum #196747) has been rejected by @DanbooruBot.