Danbooru

Pointless Pools

Posted under General

I speculated and wanted to express my concern regarding the creation of collection-type pools for visual concepts not covered by tags:
Most of them are created by users (below approvers) without further consultation with the mods/admins regarding their usefulness, created without any permission/approval from them. Thus their purpose will end up debatable among many users.

BUR #22144 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

nuke pool:20846

Unbreakable said:
pool #20846
Not sure why Umamusume need a special pool for this.

Second that. I do not see any urgency or usefulness of pools dedicated for a specific copyright that depict sadness/depression/despair of their characters, or whatever any emotion it is. Decided to create a BUR, because it still feels unfair enough to manually delete a pool without further consideration from the community.

Maybe any staff here had better send an advice, warning or discretion regarding pool creation to the creator.

Updated

World_Funeral said:

I speculated and wanted to express my concern regarding the creation of collection-type pools for visual concepts not covered by tags:
Most of them are created by users (below approvers) without further consultation with the mods/admins regarding their usefulness, created without any permission/approval from them. Thus their purpose will end up debatable among many users.

It helps if you actually name the pools you have doubts over so they can be discussed. Or are you just complaining in general about users below a certain level being allowed to make pools?

pool #1851

It's far overdue to a wiki rework, a rename into something more fitting or straight up deletion because members doesn't seem to understand what actually goes into the pool. Most people putting things there doesn't understand the divide between 'minority' as numeric concept (for art amount of certain ethnic/racial group) and 'minority' as social/political construct.

The wiki states it should be filled with only 'human' images but you can straight up find fantasy creatures like vampires/shipgirls/personifications, along with other examples of posts that doesn't belong in the pool (yet people are arguing they're allowed to exist because it's been there for ages).

If it still deemed valid enough to exist, then the pool name should be changed into something like 'Unusual Representation' or 'Uncommon Representation', and the wiki should be changed into something like this:

"Characters who are Earth (or any alternate version of it which shares the same socio-ethnogeographic divide) human, (part of) the main focus, and have an ethnic background other than European (American, Eastern and Western) or East Asian (Japan, Korea, China)."

The part in bold is added for clarity: unless the character hails from Earth or it's alternate universes, exhibiting racial traits of certain ethnicity does not give you an entry to this pool (which is further reinforced in part 3 of the wiki entry). This is to prevent people putting in characters that doesn't hail from earth (like Barrett Wallace), personifications, or characters with unclear ethnicity/background to this pool.

"Depiction of Southeastern Asian, Middle Eastern Asian, Hispanic/Latino-Latina, African, and Native American characters would belong to this pool also."

The elimination of the word 'also' removes the allusion that this rule is added as an afterthought. More importantly, the addition of the term 'character' serves as a gate for reinforcing the rule #1: that way only characters with 'clear' background, be it from meta knowledge or from artist's commentary reveal will be able to enter the pool. Why is this a thing, really? Well, due to how most characters are drawn in anime style, we can't really distinguish traits like cranial structure (which is important in identifying race/ethnicity) from the art alone, of which we need the meta knowledge of the character to include them into the pool. Characters with unclear meta background (such as Sakaki Sowande, of which only fulfills the pool entry category based on physical appearance and name) will fall into rule 3 for further entry deliberation.

"Unless expressed by the content of the image (such as focus on the ethnical attire, ceremony, or act(s) depicted in the piece) or by the artist themself (via commentary and/or wikipedia link or such), characters with dark or tan skin exhibiting certain racial traits don't necessarily fall into this pool."

Added extra explanation for clarity, as well preventing racial bias on the latter part. While it is apparent that most mis-pooled images do contain dark skin/tan skin with curly hair tags, it's kinda unfair that the limitation only works for one side of the color spectrum. What if someday, somebody uploaded a picture of white male with prominent nose, and somebody put that in this pool because they thought he was a Jewish individual?

Updated

Rathurue said:

pool #1851

It's far overdue to a wiki rework, a rename into something more fitting or straight up deletion because members doesn't seem to understand what actually goes into the pool. Most people putting things there doesn't understand the divide between 'minority' as numeric concept (for art amount of certain ethnic/racial group) and 'minority' as social/political construct.

The wiki states it should be filled with only 'human' images but you can straight up find fantasy creatures like vampires/shipgirls/personifications, along with other examples of posts that doesn't belong in the pool (yet people are arguing they're allowed to exist because it's been there for ages).

If it still deemed valid enough to exist, then the pool name should be changed into something like 'Unusual Representation' or 'Uncommon Representation', and the wiki should be changed into something like this:

"Characters who are Earth (or any alternate version of it which shares the same socio-ethnogeographic divide) human, (part of) the main focus, and have an ethnic background other than European (American, Eastern and Western) or East Asian (Japan, Korea, China)."

"Depiction of Southeastern Asian, Middle Eastern Asian, Hispanic/Latino-Latina, African, and Native American characters would belong to this pool also."

Yeah this is literally just "Not (thought to be) caucasian: the pool". Wouldn't this be based on canon as well? How many users would put Shihouin Yoruichi here? A Japanese person in Japan is absolutely not a minority, and the prerequisites would account for a majority of all posts here. This only accounts for American/western-centric worldviews.

Rathurue said:

pool #1851

Actually I now that I think about it, it would be a better idea to not group every ethnicity so broadly. For example pools like "South & Central Americans" "Native peoples of...", Native South Americans would fit into both of these.

Though would characters like David Martinez fit here since he was born in night city, California? Or even more in depth: neither because in-lore night city is a separate city-state.

I'm not sure about making a pool for all "Asian" characters, broadly grouping them all together would be problematic and since this is an anime site, redundant, so any pool unlike "south asian characters" would need to be a lot more specific.

Idk though, would this all be outside the scope of Danbooru?

BUR #22746 has been rejected.

nuke pool:Perfect_Hands
nuke pool:Perfect_Feet

We've missed out on touching this one. These two pools are basically holdovers of a time when we felt like we needed a way for (would-be) artists browsing the site to have some examples on how to draw human anatomy. They've basically become glorified favpools at this point under the guise of "artist's anatomy helper". Like what evazion said in forum #194231,

These are basically just good anatomy or good foreshortening, except the posts are all ancient and not particularly good. We already have other things like reference sheet and how tos for things specifically meant as artist references...

...when pool #322 (the "Learning How to Draw") fulfills that purpose. And even if we do have that pool, there's countless guides out there, not to mention Pixiv themselves has a part of their site dedicated to anatomy help.

Anyone here got a better alternative than having at least one builder policing the two pools 24/7 for quality check? Because while these had fulfilled their original purpose a long time ago, not only does it seem redundant in light of better source materials available around, you also have to contend with illustrations that are either:

  • okay for its time but looks average/basic now (e.g. post #153410 from the hands side and it's the header image for that pool too, and post #174165 on the feet side), or
  • the body part in question isn't even the main focus of the illustration (e.g. post #6925086 on the feet side and, again, 153410 on the hands side)

Not to mention that like what was said, the standards are always subjective by user/artist/time period, especially true with the oldest works in both pools. BTW we also got foot focus and hand focus (though the latter is starkly underpopulated compared to the former) which kinda satisfies the original intent of the two pools if one prefers to look at them without any intention to base any anatomy drawing practice.

ArcieA said:

Anyone here got a better alternative than having at least one builder policing the two pools 24/7 for quality check? Because while these had fulfilled their original purpose a long time ago, not only does it seem redundant in light of better source materials available around, you also have to contend with illustrations that are either:

  • okay for its time but looks average/basic now (e.g. post #153410 from the hands side and it's the header image for that pool too, and post #174165 on the feet side), or
  • the body part in question isn't even the main focus of the illustration (e.g. post #6925086 on the feet side and, again, 153410 on the hands side)

Not to mention that like what was said, the standards are always subjective by user/artist/time period, especially true with the oldest works in both pools. BTW we also got foot focus and hand focus (though the latter is starkly underpopulated compared to the former) which kinda satisfies the original intent of the two pools if one prefers to look at them without any intention to base any anatomy drawing practice.

I don't know what main focus has to do with the purpose of the pool. Just because it's not an in your face foot_focus post doesn't mean it shouldn't qualify. I try to add posts to the pool exactly of that type (not foot focus).

I also have treated old posts in the pool the same way we treat old posts on the site in general, with a different quality standard. I don't mind going through and cleaning it up if there is some kind of consensus. Perhaps someone should have done that long ago because many of the complaints seems to stem from decade old posts in the pool.

Updated

ArcieA said:

Anyone here got a better alternative than having at least one builder policing the two pools 24/7 for quality check? Because while these had fulfilled their original purpose a long time ago, not only does it seem redundant in light of better source materials available around, you also have to contend with illustrations that are either:

  • okay for its time but looks average/basic now (e.g. post #153410 from the hands side and it's the header image for that pool too, and post #174165 on the feet side), or
  • the body part in question isn't even the main focus of the illustration (e.g. post #6925086 on the feet side and, again, 153410 on the hands side)

Not to mention that like what was said, the standards are always subjective by user/artist/time period, especially true with the oldest works in both pools. BTW we also got foot focus and hand focus (though the latter is starkly underpopulated compared to the former) which kinda satisfies the original intent of the two pools if one prefers to look at them without any intention to base any anatomy drawing practice.

I see no problem with wanting a cleanup, but nuking things outright is a distressingly easy call for people to make around here. These are not replaced by either the *focus tags, or reference_sheet, because well, the former simply note the focus of the image, with no reference to how well it's drawn (and there are plenty of examples of feet being the focus without being good, e.g. post #6866179), and the latter is a very specific type of image for a very particular purpose, which almost no posts in the pool are.

What exactly is the difficulty in moderating them? pool:Perfect_Feet gets maybe a dozen new posts on a particularly busy week, and the hands one is more like a couple per month; that's at most 5 minutes of a single person's time a week to monitor both. I basically do it already if I see something added that obviously doesn't belong. It would be a bit more work to review all the existing entries (possibly with a slightly more lenient standard for very old posts), but still not really all that much.