Shinjidude said:
Cons to reverting the umbrella tags:
- We lose the ability to easily search by category: (sometimes neck_ribbons and bowties are close enough that you'd like to group them together).
We have wildcard searches, so *_ascot would let you search for the entire category.
- It fragments things such that individual tags are now very specific and only return a smaller number of posts or each individual tag searched.
I don't see why this is necessarily a con; having smaller, more specific tags can make it easier to find what you want than having broad tags.
- Maybe as a user I don't know exactly what an ascot is, but would like to find a character wearing one of a certain color.
If you don't know what it is you'd have to look through the entire neckwear tags to find one anyway. We could just as well have a list of neckwear meta-wiki that could help users find them.
- It will add a ton more tags back to autocomplete (especially if we similarly undo this sort of change to other umbrella tagset categories). Now a "black_" prefix will have a dozen plus tags, and the one you need may get pushed out of what pops up without a longer prefix
This likely won't be much of a problem since it's unlikely any of the individual tags will be large enough to be at the top of `black_`, and you'll have to type a couple more characters anyway. It might mean certain autocompletes people have muscle memory for now will have to be re-learned, but I don't think it's the end of the world.
- We're going to have some inertial issues with taggers. They'll keep using *_neckwear out of habit, and we have no easy way to automate cleaning that up.
This is an issue with essentially every major tag change. We'll just have to hope people will get used to the new changes, sending DMails as necessary. It's also not the end of the world since people can do cleanup of the *_neckwear tags on occasion—no information is lost there.
- Taggers will also ideally need to know and use the most detailed tag available instead of being able to rely on a category. "I know it's red_neckwear, but what exactly is this?" sort of thing.
Also happens with current tags. There are plenty of types of clothing I and others likely do not know about. We have clothing request, we could keep current *_neckwear tags as sort of "tagme"s for neckwear, have a separate neckwear_request tag... there are options to deal with this as we have with other similar issues.
- Even if the past BURs are undoable, there will still be a large amount of manual cleanup involved in undoing these to re-add specificity to posts created during the current system.
- It might (arguably should) lead to us undoing other umbrella garment tags
The latter point is exactly why I started out with neckwear, since it will probably be the easiest to cleanup. No point in me writing up a dozen BURs if ultimately this is not a desirable change. Especially tags like *_legwear which have been around since 2011. With any major change, a lot of cleanup will have to be done, and this will happen over time. We can't expect taggers to have it taken care of overnight. The beginning of the cleanup is to remove the aliases and automatically undo what we can.
As for this "right" way—people have suggested it before. It'll likely never happen. It's a restructure of the core part of the site, it's just too much of an undertaking at this point. Of course, you'd have to ask evazion to be sure.
The "right" way
Show
I think the "right" way for us to be able to handle this would be to have some sort of richer tagging system that allows tags to apply to other tags, and "belong" to other tags. Basically turning things into a full-on ontology system like WordNet or the like. That is to say I could tag an image something like "necktie{red, loose}" (just making up syntax here) with the tag "necktie" belonging to "neckwear" belonging to "accessory" belonging to "clothing" (or however detailed we wanted to go.
With that sort of system:
- My "necktie{red, loose}" tag could show up in a search for "necktie{red}", "neckwear{red, loose}", "accessory{red}", "necktie", "clothing{red}" etc. allowing your search to be as general or specific as you need it.
- There would be no need for umbrella or combo tags to directly apply to a post and inflate the tags there. "red_neckwear", "neckwear", "accessory", "clothing" wouldn't need to be applied to any post directly, but we'd still have the benefit of them acting like combos and umbrellas
- A "bowtie{red}" tag wouldn't pollute a search for "necktie{red}".
- A "necktie{red}" and a "bowtie{red}" could be tagged alongside each other and be searched for specifically (which you can't do with the umbrella system).
- we could conceivably go further and assign that "necktie{red}" to a character and say search for images of "midoriya_izuku{necktie{red}}" and get posts of just him wearing a red_necktie (not others doing so).
- maybe "midoriya_izuku" belongs to "male", and then we can search for "male{necktie{red}}" and get all boys wearing red neckties
I'm not sure what that might look like exactly, or how or if it could be made to be performant and user friendly (probably a nightmare), but that's been a pipe dream of mine for Danbooru since fairly early days. It'd be a super complex complete overhaul of the core of Danbooru though, and not something that might happen in the forseeable future if ever.
That all said, I'm not sure how I fall with respect to the idea of us undoing this umbrella system now. I was the opposite of NNT, where I remember being mostly opposed to the umbrella tag paradigm when we decided to go that path, but now question whether or not if it's worth the work and trade-offs to undo it.
