Moving the Canon pool to a tag

continuing from forum #389421:

i see Canon (pool #13629) and its sister pool, Perversion of Canon (pool #4229) as the perfect example of a pool that could be converted to a tag. their criteria are very simple and objective: posts that depict a scene from the same copyright the artwork is from.

as far as perversion of canon goes, i believe it's pretty straightforward. nothing should block it becoming a tag (that i can tell).

canon itself, however, is a different story, and i think it's going to need some more discussion before going ahead with a bur. to recycle my words from the previous thread:

the concept of pool:Canon as a tag already sort of exists in the form of scene reference, but the problem is that that tag encompasses both self-references (post #7774075), as well as references to other works (post #7952301). there's probably a discussion to be had about whether canon would be a subcategory of scene reference, or if scene reference should be remodeled to only apply to references to other copyrights, or if pool:Canon itself should simply be merged into scene reference.

additionally, the name canon as a tag name may be too simple and thus lend itself to misunderstandings in tagging. i would say call it scene reference, but well...

i'll start off with the perversion of canon bur.

BUR #48335 has been approved by @evazion.

mass update pool:4229 -> perversion_of_canon
nuke pool:4229

see op

Requires too much contextual knowledge for most people to get use out of this as a tag.

couldn't the same thing be said about scene reference?

wingdings said:

couldn't the same thing be said about scene reference?

False equivalence. All that scene reference needs is a dim remembrance of a scene in a piece of media, while both "canon" and "perversion of canon" tags require knowledge of the exact storyline of the media in question in order to know the art either follows it or perverts it.

Historyanon said:

False equivalence. All that scene reference needs is a dim remembrance of a scene in a piece of media, while both "canon" and "perversion of canon" tags require knowledge of the exact storyline of the media in question in order to know the art either follows it or perverts it.

There are many tags that require having knowledge about things that the average user won't know when tagging. I don't think that's a good reason to not have a tag for it, especially when the pool already has 1.8k posts.

NiceLittleDan said:

There are many tags that require having knowledge about things that the average user won't know when tagging. I don't think that's a good reason to not have a tag for it, especially when the pool already has 1.8k posts.

Spoilers is another good example.

Historyanon said:

All that scene reference needs is a dim remembrance of a scene in a piece of media, while both "canon" and "perversion of canon" tags require knowledge of the exact storyline of the media in question in order to know the art either follows it or perverts it.

that is of course assuming that artists regularly draw references to scenes that nobody knows about or remembers, which is a tough sell.

Unbreakable said:

Spoilers is another good example.

Spoilers is protective as a blacklist option, not a search utility tag.

Which still requires someone to have adequate knowledge to tag it, so it doesn't matter if it exists for blacklisting purposes or search utility, the core point isn't dismissed. I've had multiple Genshin Impact posts tagged as spoilers and I wouldn't know because I'm not caught up nor can I even verify if the tag should remain or not because I don't have enough knowledge to make a decision. Adding it is one discussion however; oftentimes the tag isn't maintained and spoilers is left on posts indefinitely even if whatever it's supposed to block is no longer considered a spoiler and instead widespread knowledge.

Historyanon said:

False equivalence. All that scene reference needs is a dim remembrance of a scene in a piece of media, while both "canon" and "perversion of canon" tags require knowledge of the exact storyline of the media in question in order to know the art either follows it or perverts it.

That doesn't make it a false equivalence. It's a pretty good one, even. Perversion of canon (and canon) don't necessarily require more than a high-level memory of what happened. Something like post #4756461 is pretty clearly "canon", and you can know that without needing to perfectly remember the story since it's a pretty major event. It seems like in many places scene reference and "Canon" overlap, even.

ANON_TOKYO said:

That doesn't make it a false equivalence. It's a pretty good one, even. Perversion of canon (and canon) don't necessarily require more than a high-level memory of what happened. Something like post #4756461 is pretty clearly "canon", and you can know that without needing to perfectly remember the story since it's a pretty major event. It seems like in many places scene reference and "Canon" overlap, even.

It's very much a false equivalence because one requires knowledge of the media in question while the other nothing more than awareness. Taking the very post you've linked, for example, I certainly wouldn't know it's canon because I've never played a Nier game and never plan to. Since I have friends who have played Nier, I might be aware that image is a reference of some sort, but wouldn't know anything beyond that.

I do agree that scene reference and "Canon"/Perversion thereof can overlap sometimes.

Historyanon said:

... I might be aware that image is a reference of some sort, but wouldn't know anything beyond that.

I sure hope you're not tagging it or adding it to pools without checking what you're doing is actually accurate, because it sounds like you're saying that thinking it might be a reference to *something* is enough for scene reference.

ANON_TOKYO said:

I sure hope you're not tagging it or adding it to pools without checking what you're doing is actually accurate, because it sounds like you're saying that thinking it might be a reference to *something* is enough for scene reference.

No, I only add the scene reference tag when I know of the scene being referenced. But taking post #8630500 for example, I could add the tag because I've seen the memes enough to know it's from Starship Troopers, even though I never saw the specific movie that scene is from. But I wouldn't be able to do anything with regards to Canon with that image, because I've never seen the specific movie that scene is from. My knowledge of it is from pop culture osmosis rather than personal experience.

The bulk update request #48335 (forum #389557) has been approved by @evazion.

Making it a pool instead of a tag doesn't change anything. If you can't figure when out when to use it as a tag, making it a pool instead doesn't help.

I think turning Canon into a tag is a good idea, especially if Perversion of Canon was approved, but I do think that scene reference should be altered so that it only applies to references to other copyrights (so we keep scene references and canon references separate). Doing so, however, would leave open a gap in my eyes, which is scene references that are in the same franchise but not the same entry, ex. post #9811714. Using in-franchise crossover for that seems a bit much, so maybe having something like in-franchise_canon_reference as an in-between tag would work.

On the naming front though, the best I can think of is, like, canon_scene or canon_reference, though honestly I think canon would probably work just fine. We already have multiple tags which reference the concept of canon, canon vs fanon (meme), oc x canon, the aliases for the alternate breast size tags, etc. The only downside would be the fact that it might get mistagged by folks trying to tag cannon.

I think just "canon" should be okay, but if we want to be granular, "canon reference" would probably be the best name for it.

some thoughts on implying vs mutual exclusivity:

both solutions would unfortunately require some post-bur gardening from people familiar with copyrights in both tags, though this requirement manifests itself in different ways depending on solution:

• in the case of implying, it's simply a matter of adding canon to posts where it belongs.
• it may also be beneficial for searching, for example someone looking for any reference no matter what can simply search scene_reference.
• on the flipside, someone looking for only external references now has to exclude canon from that search.
• it also means we don't have to redefine scene reference at all, since it already accounts for self-references.
• in the case of mutual exclusivity between canon and scene reference, their scene reference search will now be peppered with random posts that should be canon instead until people familiar enough get around to gardening it.
• which could take however long with how many obscure copyrights are in there, and depending on how many people care enough.
• this is bad, because it means temporarily making a tag littered with things that don't belong with no promise of it being resolved in a timely manner.

weighing the pros and cons, an implication seems like the best option here, but i'm also wondering if mutual exclusivity is worth the extra effort.

BUR #48597 has been rejected.

mass update pool:13629 -> canon
nuke pool:13629

Let's try to create a successful tag conversion before we go into the inevitable lengthy discussion regarding the implication, which should probably be separate from this BUR.

As it stands, I don't see why perversion of canon shouldn't then logically imply canon. Unless you really don't want porn in your canon search I guess? is:sfw is right there...