Posted under Tags
The wiki for costume_switch says that "*_(cosplay) tags are not necessary since it is obvious the two characters are cosplaying each other". While obvious in context of a single picture, that makes it hard to search for all the instances of a character's costume being worn, since some might be under the costume_switch tag.
Because of that, I'm in favor of changing the line from the wiki and making the cosplayed character tags mandatory.
Yeah I don't think that clause makes sense either. costume_switch -cosplay is empty so it doesn't look like people have been paying much mind to it anyway.
nonamethanks said:
costume_switch -cosplay is empty
That's because costume_switch implies cosplay.
I think it's more the directive not to use *_(cosplay) character cosplay tags at issue here. You can't query directly with a negative wildcard, but if I compare post counts:
The post count for costume_switch is 3,567, the post count for costume_switch *_(cosplay) is 421. So it seems 3,146 or 88.2% of costume_switch posts are following the directive, intentionally or otherwise.
If there was policy discussion on this, it was either prior to the current forum, off-site, or I can't find it. The wiki edit is only 10 years old, and most cosplay policy was set earlier, but i can't find much of anything relevant from around that time.
The description seems to imply that it's to protect the case where you would search "character cosplay -character_(cosplay)" to get all cases where the target character is the one doing the cosplay? That's a weird search case, but it does work (e.g. "ayanami_rei -ayanami_rei_(cosplay) cosplay" gives you about 100 instances of that sort of thing). You'd think for most characters you'd get a lot of tag errors too. Changing policy on costume_switch would possibly lead to some posts in that odd search case not being searchable anymore, but you'd think the effect would be minimal.
It's actually worded closer to say the converse where you want to search "-ayanami_rei ayanami_rei_(cosplay) cosplay" and get all people in the character's outfit, but not the character itself. That direction doesn't work at all though since all *_(cosplay) tags include the character tag too. That rule wasn't automatic at one point, but I think it was pretty old, and again wouldn't be affected much by costume_switch as a not-too-common tag.
I don't really have much by way of good argument towards not changing that rule.
Updated
Shinjidude said:
The post count for costume_switch is 3,567, the post count for costume_switch *_(cosplay) is 421. So it seems 3,146 or 88.2% of costume_switch posts are following the directive, intentionally or otherwise.
Actually, wildcard searches only expand up to 25 tags, regardless of user level, so that's not accurate.
I did a search through the api and the actual results are:
Posts with no _(cosplay) tag in the costume_switch search: 1244
Posts with at least one _(cosplay) tag: 2323
So there's more posts that break the directive than there are with the "correct" tag set.
nonamethanks said:
Actually, wildcard searches only expand up to 25 tags, regardless of user level, so that's not accurate.
...
So there's more posts that break the directive than there are with the "correct" tag set.
Good to know, and provides even more reason to change the rule.
