tags: singular and plural

When I browse Danbooru, I see that some tags are used randomly in singular or plural form. E.g.: bracelet and bracelets.

Maybe it is better to only use one form.

Usually when both forms are used for something common they both get aliased to one form or the other. I really can't figure out the criteria used to pick one or the other though, 'guns' -> 'gun', but 'sword' -> 'swords'.

I would request aliases for them as I find them except that I don't really want to flood the form with a ton of plural alias requests for tags that aren't used that frequently. Potentially almost every random noun that's used as a tag would have an alias at that point, and that's probably too much.

Is there any official preference for either form, singular vs plural?

Maybe if it was just the singular so people know there's at least one 'gun' or 'sword' in there.

I think that singular tags are better, even if there are multiple similar object in the picture.

eli said:
Maybe if it was just the singular so people know there's at least one 'gun' or 'sword' in there.

I have no opinion either way, but I just did a search and it seems that all sword images as of now are currently being marked with the plural tag "swords"?

case649 said:
...all sword images as of now are currently being marked with the plural tag "swords"?

That's because of the alias. You can't add singular 'sword', because 'sword' -> 'swords'. If I remember correctly, when the aliasing system was first introduced, one of the very first aliases was 'book' -> 'books'. I don't know if that is official policy or not though, because 'guns' -> 'gun' is very recent.

Albert says he prefers singular tags and has been aliasing things to that effect. If you note something that isn't aliased yet, suggest it.

Shinjidude said:
I would request aliases for them as I find them except that I don't really want to flood the form with a ton of plural alias requests for tags that aren't used that frequently.

Don't sweat it. Aliases are cheap, you can't really "flood" the system with them. And if anything, adding them for less frequently used tags helps, as that gives a chance for at least some consistency in tagging.

I suppose plural tags are more common. Like breasts and panties. But there are times when I think singular tags make more sense, like skirt, dress, tail, or bra. Maybe I'm being irrational. If there's a strong desire to enforce one style, then I'll go along (although it will mean a lot of retroactive renaming).

albert said:
I suppose plural tags are more common. Like breasts and panties. But there are times when I think singular tags make more sense, like skirt, dress, tail, or bra. Maybe I'm being irrational. If there's a strong desire to enforce one style, then I'll go along (although it will mean a lot of retroactive renaming).

I think almost all of the cases where it makes sense to go plural are either binary or mass nouns where they have to be (e.g. panties, glasses, clothes) or nouns that naturally come in pairs (e.g. breasts, eyes, twintails).

Anything else I think would make sense to have singular (e.g. gun, sword, book), and they are probably more commonly used to tag single instances anyway.

If you like I can go through the aliases tonight sometime when I have time, and list the aliases that should be flipped according to that scheme. I don't know if it's necessarily worth doing or not, but it probably would be good to be consistent, if only so people know which form new tags should take.

It's been "swords" for as long as I remember, and I rationalised it as being the tag for "images containing swords" rather than just being "this image contains a sword".

albert said: I suppose plural tags are more common. Like breasts and panties. But there are times when I think singular tags make more sense, like skirt, dress, tail, or bra. Maybe I'm being irrational. If there's a strong desire to enforce one style, then I'll go along (although it will mean a lot of retroactive renaming).

Shinjidude basically covered it. Obviously 'breast' is not going to be used as a tag, nor 'panty', etc. Those we can just classify by common sense.

Other than that, I don't care if it's single or plural, either is fine, consistent is best.

Ok, I just went through the aliases, and it doesn't seem as bad as I expected. Here's all the singular → plural aliases that should be swapped if we want to normalize nouns to singular.

apple → apples
book → books
butterfly → butterflies
cat_tail → cat_tails (also cattail → cat_tails needs changed)
chain → chains
cherry → cherries
flower → flowers
peach → peaches
ribbon → ribbons
strawberry → strawberries
sword → swords
tattoo → tattoos (also tatoo → tattoos needs changed)

There's no doubt a ton of informally normalized plural tags out there that should be aliased, but they wouldn't affect updating the current list.

The ones that have already been approved had better implications under the plural than under the singular, albert said this a while back.

Log said:
The ones that have already been approved had better implications under the plural than under the singular, albert said this a while back.

Really? I guess by retroactive renaming he meant currently unaliased ones then.

I would still change at least 'sword → swords' though, since 'swords' doesn't seem natural for most images it's used in.

'cat_tails' also sounds unnatural for an image with one person.

The only implication that would be affected by any of the above is:

katana → swords