imply superman -> clark_kent (brainstorming a policy for superheroes vs civilian identities)

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Mars49 said in forum #432750:

3 In post #6378493 I would use spider-man_(cosplay), spidersona is debatable, but leave it if you prefer. Or if the BUR is approved, should we use other_(spider-man) as a chartag in this and other edge cases?

other (spider-man) is perhaps the worst option possible here. I personally am partial to the concept of a Spider-Man costume tag (and similar tags for other Very Iconic superheroes), but this option is definitely the worst.

4. Should spidersona be a child of spider-man_(series)/spider-man? I ask because all spidersona posts have spider-man and spider-man_(series) tags.
5. Should spider-man_logo be a child of spider-man_(series)? I ask in case someone wants them in the general result of the search.

It's not possible to imply tags across categories.

Ylimegirl said in forum #432851:

other (spider-man) is perhaps the worst option possible here. I personally am partial to the concept of a Spider-Man costume tag (and similar tags for other Very Iconic superheroes), but this option is definitely the worst.

It's not possible to imply tags across categories.

1. Regarding other_(spider-man), I was following nonamethanks' logic.

2. You mean gentag and chartag to copytag, but gentag to chartag; I think it's possible, for the existence of spider-man_(cosplay) because this one implies spider-man and cosplay.

Regarding spider-man_logo, I was asking if someone wants it in the general search for spider-man or spider-man_(series). Such an implication would accelerate tagging, but in the end, only a few posts use spider-man_logo, and we can tag them manually.

P.S. I don't believe a random person wearing a shirt with the spider-man_logo is a Spider-Man character, a spidersona probably, but... it's questionable.

Question:

If spider-man is an alias for spider-man_(peter_parker), then spider-man_(cosplay) would imply it as well. Are you suggesting that any Spider-Man cosplay is specifically a Peter Parker cosplay? Or should we create unique cosplay tags for every version (Miles Morales, Original Suit, Original Black Suit, etc.)?

Mars49 said in forum #432863:

2. You mean gentag and chartag to copytag, but gentag to chartag; I think it's possible, for the existence of spider-man_(cosplay) because this one implies spider-man and cosplay.

Cosplay tags are a special case. You may notice the difference in wording on the wiki pages for Spider-Man (series) and Spider-Man (Cosplay); "This tag implicates marvel" versus "This tag automatically adds spider-man and cosplay". You can check the wiki for help:bulk update requests if you don't believe my word, I guess.

PersonalFowl said in forum #432710:

My proposal:

Alias one of these as the other (don't care which)
Peter_parker_(spider-man) <-> spider-man_(peter_parker)

Then do either:
Spider-man_(peter_parker) -> Spider-man
Spider-man_(peter_parker -> Peter_parker
OR
Peter_parker_(spider-man) -> Spider-man
Peter_parker_(spider-man) -> Peter_parker

Then you could slot in Peter_parker_(civilian) -> Peter_parker without any trouble.

The problem with double implications is that they look bad. In the sidebar, with the bare minimum change I'm proposing, it'd look like:

But it still does not fix the issue of suits. If we have subtags for some of Peter Parker's most popular suits, we'd end up with six different tags in the sidebar, which looks extremely stupid:

Even assuming we don't create the implications for spider-man and just say to add it manually for the sake of the sidebar's neatness, nobody has answered yet what the threshold is for someone to be implied to spider-man. Should Spider-Man Noir or Spider-Man (2099) imply it? Spider-Noir looks nothing like the other spider-men, aside from his mask.
What about Web-Slinger (Character), or Spider-Punk, or Spiders-Man? Spider-Ham? Sp//Dr?

I'm still not seeing any concrete answer to this.
There's other cases this could apply to, especially given the rule that implied tags cannot make up >95% of the umbrella tag. There's a lot of characters like Iron Man that are 99% a single character, with tiny exceptions like Pepper Potts or James Rhodes that are only Iron Man for like two seconds before they get their alternate superhero name.
What about Captain Marvel (Marvel), should we have an umbrella tag for them too? Half of them are women, half men or alien.
What about the various Batgirls? Compare batgirl_costume_(2021_cassandra) vs batgirl costume (2021 stephanie) vs batgirl_costume_(2014). Don't fall into the trap of trying to group things together just because they share a name.
What about Batman? Should Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson's batman also have an umbrella tag?
What about Bizarro (Superman) and Superman and Ultraman (Dc)? Those have the exact same relationship as all of these spider-men.
For some other characters like green_lantern we could just have green lantern corps be the umbrella tag and the chartags would not need an umbrella, but there's no easy solution for the rest of these characters unless we really want something like spider-man suit for any character remotely looking like Spider-Man (the individual suits like the Symbiote suit should still be implied to the character they canonically belong to).

Mars49 said in forum #432715:

IMO, the argument that people search for the 'person' over the 'myth' is flawed. If I search for peter_parker, I expect the civilian aesthetic. If I want the superhero/supervillain, I search for the title/mantle.

Look at peter_parker spider-man. What you expect means nothing to the average user.

nonamethanks said in forum #432891:

Even assuming we don't create the implications for spider-man and just say to add it manually for the sake of the sidebar's neatness, nobody has answered yet what the threshold is for someone to be implied to spider-man. Should Spider-Man Noir or Spider-Man (2099) imply it? Spider-Noir looks nothing like the other spider-men, aside from his mask.
What about Web-Slinger (Character), or Spider-Punk, or Spiders-Man? Spider-Ham? Sp//Dr?

I'm still not seeing any concrete answer to this.
There's other cases this could apply to, especially given the rule that implied tags cannot make up >95% of the umbrella tag. There's a lot of characters like Iron Man that are 99% a single character, with tiny exceptions like Pepper Potts or James Rhodes that are only Iron Man for like two seconds before they get their alternate superhero name.
What about Captain Marvel (Marvel), should we have an umbrella tag for them too? Half of them are women, half men or alien.
What about the various Batgirls? Compare batgirl_costume_(2021_cassandra) vs batgirl costume (2021 stephanie) vs batgirl_costume_(2014). Don't fall into the trap of trying to group things together just because they share a name.
What about Batman? Should Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson's batman also have an umbrella tag?
What about Bizarro (Superman) and Superman and Ultraman (Dc)? Those have the exact same relationship as all of these spider-men.
For some other characters like green_lantern we could just have green lantern corps be the umbrella tag and the chartags would not need an umbrella, but there's no easy solution for the rest of these characters unless we really want something like spider-man suit for any character remotely looking like Spider-Man (the individual suits like the Symbiote suit should still be implied to the character they canonically belong to).

The impression I have is this, focusing squarely on normies: I think normies are way more focused on the superhero/supervillain persona than they are the civilian persona. The average user on Danbooru sits between the normie and the comic book/movie nerd, and I think this is reflected in tagging practice. Taking your peter_parker spider-man search as an example, we have post #11120155 - we have Spider-Man tagged here not just as tag padding, when Peter Parker would suffice, but also because "Spider-Man" is how the character is called in Marvel Rivals, making it thus findable under spider-man marvel_rivals, which is what normies would search for. peter_parker marvel_rivals is less intuitive for normies because the average normie does not read text.

While you have convinced me that having the civilian persona as the umbrella tag is the way to go forward, it hasn't convinced me that the underlying reasoning for having the superhero persona as the umbrella tag shouldn't be accomodated for. Normies fundamentally care more about the superhero persona, and have perfectly accepted the disparate designs lumped under them - the difference between something like Spider-Man (Original Suit) and Spider-Man Noir is seen by them on the same level as Batgirl Costume (2021 Cassandra) and Batgirl Costume (2021 Stephanie).

Since shifting to the civilian persona as the umbrella tag will necessarily result in the destruction of tags like Spider-Man and Batgirl for qualified equivalents for their respective heroes, that then necessitates a new tag to accomodate those who want to see them all - ergo, spider-man suit and batgirl suit. This also ensures that we don't see Peter Parker (Spider-Man) and similar mistagged.

Damian0358 said in forum #432911:

The reason why I proposed qualified tags for superheroes is that if you type spider-man in the autocomplete when trying to tag Peter parker, you will get offered a list of spider-men with their full name in the tag name.

So, someone who wants to tag spider-man on peter parker will type "spider-man" and be presented with:

etc

And this would, or at least should, give them pause. Even in the worst case scenario where they pick the first option anyway on civilian pictures, at the end of the day we still end up with all peter parker pictures under peter parker the umbrella tag, so it's only a matter of moving posts from the superhero tag to the civilian tag, rather than the clusterfuck we have now where different characters are mixed together. There will still be mistags and errors, but I think they will be a lot more manageable.

For *_suit, I really don't want to end up on a spot where we have batman suit with Bruce Wayne's batman making up 99% of the posts. I would say if we really want to go down that route, we should only make those tags only for big tags where multiple superheroes share the same name in equal parts (such as Spider-Man, Batgirl, maybe Robin (DC)) (post #11100274). It would have to be a case-by-case basis depending on how much of a mess the status quo after this change is. green lantern corps can stay like that unless we want to rename it to green lantern suit... Which wouldn't be a bad idea because right now it's getting slapped on random characters that belong to the corps even when they don't have a costume on (post #10839746, post #1671608).

nonamethanks said in forum #432964:

For *_suit, I really don't want to end up on a spot where we have batman suit with Bruce Wayne's batman making up 99% of the posts. I would say if we really want to go down that route, we should only make those tags only for big tags where multiple superheroes share the same name in equal parts (such as Spider-Man, Batgirl, maybe Robin (DC)) (post #11100274). It would have to be a case-by-case basis depending on how much of a mess the status quo after this change is. green lantern corps can stay like that unless we want to rename it to green lantern suit... Which wouldn't be a bad idea because right now it's getting slapped on random characters that belong to the corps even when they don't have a costume on (post #10839746, post #1671608).

Willing to agree on that, and on renaming Green Lantern corps to Green Lantern suit.

nonamethanks said in forum #432612 and forum #432614:

The real problem is cases like Peter B Parker, but the real question is whether Peter B Parker should imply Peter Parker - or in general, how to deal with alternate universe versions of the same character.
There's two ways to solve this that I can think of:


In my suggested proposal, and assuming we treat alternate version as additional modifier chartags and not entire new layers of implications:

post #8376961 would look like this:

post #6482175 would be like this (assuming we create further subtags for all the billion different suits):


If we instead treat them as separate characters:

post #8376961 would look like this:

post #6482175 would like this (again, assuming we create further subtags for all the billion different suits):


The second option here is more pleasing for me in the first case, but the second case reveals the bigger problem: if we have subtags for variations of the suit, then it becomes a true clusterfuck because we either have a stray Spider-Man (Original Suit) that implies nothing, or we have to make peter parker (comics) (spider-man) (original suit) too (Peter B Parker does not need it because he doesnt have other suits).

And keep in mind, miles morales could appear twice too, as the one from the comic, and the one from the spider-verse movie, because they are technically different characters! This is the main reason why comic characters are a complete clusterfuck.


Some characters are not known by their name at all, or rarely appear as civilians. This is another point to iron out.

We could do it either like:

or we could decide on a case by case basis using the notability rule, and go

or we could even do

The last approach is the one that seems the most sensible to me, and the one that we'll likely have to apply to most of the smaller superhero tags. It's easy to rename them if we get a big influx of posts anyway: the civilian tag would already exist, so we'd just do a mass update to create a new tag specifically for the costume and rename the parent tag as appropriate.
As long as each individual character has a single parent chartag where everything else is collected, all further adjustments are easy.

With most things agreed upon, I think we should focus the discussion now on these bits, since we can't progress forward until we figure out what would be best for the umbrella tag.

We could revive one of the worst Fate tagging practices (topic #19122) and reintroduce shit like Peter Parker (All). /j Out of the options suggested thus far, I think the umbrella structure of

  • CivillianName
    • CivillianName (SuperheroName)
    • CivillianName (Civillian)

makes the most sense.

I think case-by-case basis is definitely the correct call for if a superhero costume warrants a gentag. Spiderman & Robin absolutely warrant a gentags, Superman maybe, Wonder Woman & Batman probably not, Harley Quinn definitely not.

nonamethanks said in forum #432891:

The problem with double implications is that they look bad. In the sidebar, with the bare minimum change I'm proposing, it'd look like:

But it still does not fix the issue of suits. If we have subtags for some of Peter Parker's most popular suits, we'd end up with six different tags in the sidebar, which looks extremely stupid:

I did not consider the double implications effect on the sidebar. It's easy to imagine it getting obnoxious even with just an image of the Justice League all together, for example. The only reason I even want the Peter<-> Spidey connection in the first place is to make things slightly easier for tagging and searching. But just to be clear, what I imagined was more like:

There could be as many subtags under Spider-Man as desired if people want to go absolutely nuts. Also this allows us to keep the Spider-man (cosplay) tag instead of needing to do something unintuitive like Peter Parker (Spider-Man) (cosplay).

I don't have a good answer for the whole "what is a spider-man, anyway?" question other than a two-fold test. Does the copyright owner call them that name? And does the community at large know them by that name? It's def more complex than that, so idk. I will say that a search of spider-man -spider-man_(original_suit) gives results like post #8606755. Most of the results are civvie Peter, the black suit, Miles, or cosplay, which kind of shows the need for action in the first place.

What if we add _(civilian) to peter_parker, clark_kent, etc.? This way, we force users to tag correctly. Then we create the tag for peter_parker_(spider-man) (or vice versa) and use spider-man as the parent.

While *_(civilian) might sound a bit clunky, it would help stop people from using the base name tag on every post featuring a superhero. By keeping the superhero/supervillain title as the Parent Tag, we’re prioritizing what people actually look for: the visual concept.

This also avoids creating redundant tags like spider-man_suit or costume when a functional concept tag already exists, and it prevents the massive tag-bloat in the sidebar for famous heroes.

It feels less aggressive overall, although someone will still have to clean up the mistagged posts anyway.

P.S.: For unmasked superheroes, we could use superhero + unmasked_superhero.

P.S. 2: This is pretty much what nonamethanks suggested lol, but I flipped the hierarchy so the hero is the parent. It keeps the identities separate while focusing the search on the archetype.

Mars49 said in forum #433069:

P.S. 2: This is pretty much what nonamethanks suggested lol, but I flipped the hierarchy so the hero is the parent. It keeps the identities separate while focusing the search on the archetype.

"superhero names as the umbrella" can't be the default rule because there's characters like Dick Grayson, who has been Batman, Robin, Nightwing, and a bunch of other superheroes, and none of them can be the umbrella for "Dick Grayson". Nearly every major superhero has been multiple superheroes at some point, including Peter Parker (who's been Captain America) and Bruce Banner (who's been Spider-man) and Clark Kent (Green Lantern).

nonamethanks said in forum #433117:

"superhero names as the umbrella" can't be the default rule because there's characters like Dick Grayson, who has been Batman, Robin, Nightwing, and a bunch of other superheroes, and none of them can be the umbrella for "Dick Grayson". Nearly every major superhero has been multiple superheroes at some point, including Peter Parker (who's been Captain America) and Bruce Banner (who's been Spider-man) and Clark Kent (Green Lantern).

I think you might have misunderstood me. I’m not saying you should use batman as the parent for bruce_wayne_(civilian). My proposal is that the visual concept should act as the container:

Hero as Parent: batman would be the parent of batman_(bruce_wayne), batman_(dick_grayson), etc. If I search for batman, I see everyone wearing the Batman suit.

Isolated Identity: bruce_wayne_(civilian) or dick_grayson_(civilian) are kept isolated for identity-based searches.

Using the robin_(dc) example you mentioned: we would have robin_(dick_grayson), robin_(jason_todd), robin_(damian_wayne), etc., as children. If someone searches for robin_(dc), they want to see the archetype of the sidekick in the red and green suit.

Your argument that Dick has been Robin, Nightwing, and Batman is exactly why the real name cannot be the "umbrella" tag. If I set dick_grayson as the parent for everything, a search for dick_grayson becomes a visual dumping ground of five different outfits. Instead, with my system:

If I want to see the Nightwing suit, I search nightwing.

If I want to see the Robin suit, I search robin_(dc).

If I want to see Dick in civilian clothes, I search dick_grayson_(civilian).

We cannot design the database based on rare biographical exceptions (like Peter Parker being Captain America once). We must design it for the 99% of users who search by visual archetype.

In cases where the content volume is very small or heavily weighted toward one side, for example, harley_quinn, let's use that as the primary tag, especially if there are almost no posts of her as Harleen Quinzel. The same would apply to Carrie Kelley and others.

Mars49 said in forum #433218:

I think you might have misunderstood me. I’m not saying you should use batman as the parent for bruce_wayne_(civilian). My proposal is that the visual concept should act as the container:

Hero as Parent: batman would be the parent of batman_(bruce_wayne), batman_(dick_grayson), etc. If I search for batman, I see everyone wearing the Batman suit.

Isolated Identity: bruce_wayne_(civilian) or dick_grayson_(civilian) are kept isolated for identity-based searches.

Using the robin_(dc) example you mentioned: we would have robin_(dick_grayson), robin_(jason_todd), robin_(damian_wayne), etc., as children. If someone searches for robin_(dc), they want to see the archetype of the sidekick in the red and green suit.

Your argument that Dick has been Robin, Nightwing, and Batman is exactly why the real name cannot be the "umbrella" tag. If I set dick_grayson as the parent for everything, a search for dick_grayson becomes a visual dumping ground of five different outfits. Instead, with my system:

If I want to see the Nightwing suit, I search nightwing.

If I want to see the Robin suit, I search robin_(dc).

If I want to see Dick in civilian clothes, I search dick_grayson_(civilian).

We cannot design the database based on rare biographical exceptions (like Peter Parker being Captain America once). We must design it for the 99% of users who search by visual archetype.

In cases where the content volume is very small or heavily weighted toward one side, for example, harley_quinn, let's use that as the primary tag, especially if there are almost no posts of her as Harleen Quinzel. The same would apply to Carrie Kelley and others.

So how would the tag Dick Grayson exist in this case, then? Is it the parent of Dick Grayson (Civillian)? Is it an isolated tag you just have to remember to tag alongisde Nightwing, Robin (DC), and Dick Grayson (Civillian) as appropriate (which is already the current situation?)

Ylimegirl said in forum #433225:

So how would the tag Dick Grayson exist in this case, then? Is it the parent of Dick Grayson (Civillian)? Is it an isolated tag you just have to remember to tag alongisde Nightwing, Robin (DC), and Dick Grayson (Civillian) as appropriate (which is already the current situation?)

1. dick_grayson should be moved to dick_grayson_(civilian) specifically to force users to stop and think. When the autocomplete shows them *_(civilian) instead of the base name, it prevents them from blindly using the identity tag as a synonym for robin_(dc), batman, or nightwing.

2. Why would we make dick_grayson the parent of dick_grayson_(civilian)? It would be a 'single parent' with no other siblings in that tree. I think you might be mixing up the proposals. As we have stated repeatedly, we want to avoid double parents and the visual bloat in the sidebar

3. No, if the image shows Nightwing, you tag nightwing. If it shows Dick as Robin, you tag robin_(dick_grayson). You don't need to add the base dick_grayson/dick_grayson_(civilian) tag. The tags should be modular and based on what is actually visible.

Mars49 said in forum #433243:

2. Why would we make dick_grayson the parent of dick_grayson_(civilian)?

To search for that character in all of his costumes as the same time, which is how the rest of the site works. You're suggesting that we split these tags apart even more, when it's obvious that nobody cares about the distinction.

Just look at superman clark_kent, with its 200+ posts, or miguel_o'hara spider-man_(2099), which is more than half of Spider-Man (2099).

You are suggesting that to search for all incarnations of Dick Grayson one would have to search for four or five different tags instead of just searching for Dick Grayson. That's stupid, it's making our life hell for no reason. This character is perfectly recognizable as Dick Grayson, he's only wearing a domino mask. You would have to be blind to not recognize him as Dick Grayson.

Your proposal suggests that there's no similarity between Clark Kent and superman and they should stay apart as tags, despite the fact that the only visual difference is whether he's wearing glasses. Don't you see how dumb that is? It's literally the same guy!

Updated by nonamethanks

Mars49 said in forum #433243:

3. No, if the image shows Nightwing, you tag nightwing. If it shows Dick as Robin, you tag robin_(dick_grayson). You don't need to add the base dick_grayson/dick_grayson_(civilian) tag. The tags should be modular and based on what is actually visible.

I left it out of my reply because I thought it was so stupid that it couldn't be what you were insinuating, but if this is truly your position then if someone wants to search for all images of Dick Grayson, they have to do dick_grayson_(civillian) or nightwing or robin_(dick_grayson) or batman_(dick_grayson). Literally what? This would be like if we told people "yeah we don't have a tag for Saber Alter, just search for Saber_Alter_* instead." Except worse, because wildcard searches don't even work in this scenario!

nonamethanks said in forum #433246:

You are suggesting that to search for all incarnations of Dick Grayson one would have to search for four or five different tags instead of just searching for Dick Grayson. That's stupid, it's making our life hell for no reason. This character is perfectly recognizable as Dick Grayson, he's only wearing a domino mask. You would have to be blind to not recognize him as Dick Grayson.

Ylimegirl said in forum #432977:

Out of the options suggested thus far, I think the umbrella structure of

  • CivillianName
    • CivillianName (SuperheroName)
    • CivillianName (Civillian)

makes the most sense.

nonamethanks said in forum #432964:

The reason why I proposed qualified tags for superheroes is that if you type spider-man in the autocomplete when trying to tag Peter parker, you will get offered a list of spider-men with their full name in the tag name.

So, someone who wants to tag spider-man on peter parker will type "spider-man" and be presented with:

etc

And this would, or at least should, give them pause. Even in the worst case scenario where they pick the first option anyway on civilian pictures, at the end of the day we still end up with all peter parker pictures under peter parker the umbrella tag, so it's only a matter of moving posts from the superhero tag to the civilian tag, rather than the clusterfuck we have now where different characters are mixed together. There will still be mistags and errors, but I think they will be a lot more manageable.

For *_suit, I really don't want to end up on a spot where we have batman suit with Bruce Wayne's batman making up 99% of the posts. I would say if we really want to go down that route, we should only make those tags only for big tags where multiple superheroes share the same name in equal parts (such as Spider-Man, Batgirl, maybe Robin (DC)) (post #11100274). It would have to be a case-by-case basis depending on how much of a mess the status quo after this change is. green lantern corps can stay like that unless we want to rename it to green lantern suit... Which wouldn't be a bad idea because right now it's getting slapped on random characters that belong to the corps even when they don't have a costume on (post #10839746, post #1671608).

I agree with all of these points. There's always going to be some messiness and exceptions when it comes to superheroes and their stupid tangled webs, but most of them will be able to fit into this policy.

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