Create alias ski_mask -> balaclava

BUR #8451 has been rejected.

create alias ski_mask -> balaclava

Balaclavas are also known as ski masks, even the wiki for the tag says so. I feel like this alias will make tagging better/easier when people know the term “ski mask” but not “balaclava” (such as myself until today).

Ski_mask is empty for a reason. If it weren't an ambiguous term, I would have submitted this alias myself years ago. But people have historically used this tag for ski_goggles, and this alias would almost certainly result in goggles being unwittingly mistagged as balaclava.

iridescent_slime said:

Ski_mask is empty for a reason. If it weren't an ambiguous term, I would have submitted this alias myself years ago.

I wouldn’t say it’s ambiguous. I think if you ask most people what a ski mask is they would agree that it’s the thing that robbers wear over their heads instead if a pair of goggles. When I Google image searched “ski mask” I didn’t get any images of goggles either other than ski masks that *come with ski goggles*.

Since there’s only about 9 people who tagged ski goggles as “ski mask” out of the ~200 images tagged balaclava and ski goggles respectively, I’d like to think those taggers simply made a mistake rather than believing a ski goggle is a ski mask.

Yes, people make mistakes. And the problem with aliases is, it doesn't notify taggers that they made a mistake. Danbooru silently replaces the tag and nobody will know what happened unless they double-check everything. Nine different people making the same mistake over the years may not seem like a lot to you, but that much would still account for roughly 4% of the balaclava tag, which is frankly an unacceptable error rate.

This is the same reason hair and straw remain as empty pages rather than being aliased to severed_hair and drinking_straw; it's a lot easier to maintain a tag that is meant to have zero posts than routinely sift through a tag that has an alias pointing to it. It's very obvious when someone unwittingly repopulates a tag that has been purged, but in the event of an alias, the only way to find accidental mistags is by painstakingly checking individual posts.

iridescent_slime said:

This is the same reason hair and straw remain as empty pages rather than being aliased to severed_hair and drinking_straw; it's a lot easier to maintain a tag that is meant to have zero posts than routinely sift through a tag that has an alias pointing to it. It's very obvious when someone unwittingly repopulates a tag that has been purged, but in the event of an alias, the only way to find accidental mistags is by painstakingly checking individual posts.

I feel like hair and straw are empty pages for different reasons though. Hair can be interpreted as hair on a head or fallen hair, its meaning ambiguous so it’s obviously better to just make it have 0 posts. Similarly, straw can be interpreted as a drinking straw or hay, the meaning ambiguous. However, again, the meaning of ski mask is NOT ambiguous. It’s similar to tagging mouth mask or oni mask. There’s no definitional ambiguity from aliasing ski mask to balaclava, especially when both mean exactly the same thing.

When I was talking about accidental mistags I meant accidentally clicking the wrong tag (EX: clicking blue bow instead of blue background because the post counts for each are close). Of course, I have no idea why there are so many mistags then. It’s also possible they misunderstood what ski mask means just like how people are tagging bust cup images as wakamezake, but even then wakamezake has a distinct definition separate from bust cup, even if both relate to liquids being collected on a woman’s body (in this case ski equipment worn on the face). Are we going to remove the wakamezake tag because a lot of people got it’s definition wrong? I think it’s unlikely.

Either way, my point is that people won’t be tagging ski goggles as ski masks unless they misclicked or misunderstood its definition, not because ski mask has multiple meanings and they simply chose a definition that fits an image.

While we should try to minimize tag definition misunderstandings related to alias, you need to convince me how exactly a large population of taggers will see ski masks as goggles for me to believe the alias is unviable.

The term is too ambiguous, and this is one of those aliases we'll have to remove in a year because of too many mistags by blind taggers. Unfortunately we always have to assume that half the userbase barely understands english.

The bulk update request #8451 (forum #203329) has been rejected by @nonamethanks.