Nuking Overly Specific Mario Costume Tags

Oh hey, now that I've been namedropped in this thread and am also on my laptop instead of on my smartphone, time to chime in with my own two cents, by which I mean several paragraphs of kind of unorganized semi-coherent trains of thought.

As the currently most mentally ill Fate tagger [citation needed], there are some obvious benefits to costume chartags. That being said, the argument for them should not start and end with "danbooru is a comprehensive database and we need costume chartags for every single copyright no matter what", because that is stupid.
I think combining similar-looking costumes with superficial differences is perfectly acceptable, and something we already do for FGO. Jeanne d'Arc (White Cruising) also encapsulates her similar-looking but not 100% identical Gravure Vacances costume from Fate/Extella, and Francis Drake (Stormy Seas Outfit) likewise covers the unnamed slightly different outfit she's seen wearing in the Atlantis Lostbelt. This is not a problem whatsoever, because if for some reason you actually care which pattern of bikini Jeanne is wearing or which eyepatched version of Drake you want, that is easily clarified with a two-tag search (costume/character + copyright).
And for Drake specifically there's also the Atlantis Lostbelt tag you can use instead, which is also what is currently being used for a lot of other alternate appearances throughout FGO--no individual tag for Sion Eltnam Sokaris as she appears aged down in Paper Moon, you can find what you're looking for with decent accuracy via sion_eltnam_sokaris paper_moon_(fate/grand_order). Same with the recently revealed younger version of Vritra in the current event, currently being covered by vritra_(fate) indra_no_dai_shiren. And so on and so forth.

Are all of these searches 100% accurate? No, but neither is any other search on Danbooru, including ones for costume tags. Just try looking through xiang_yu_(fate) solo right now, see how many of those results are actually for Yu Mei-ren, especially her lancer version with the character hair ornament. If there's only 1 or 2 false positives per page for a given 2-tag query, then we've got a winner. (If you want images of Xiang Yu you have better luck just looking through his regular tag without the solo qualifier, there's less than 10 pages of posts with him so that's not an issue.)
One of the few things I course corrected on in this regard was the creation of the Lady Yu doll tag, so its easier to find actual posts featuring yu_mei-ren_(fate) xu_fu_(fate) paired up together. And even then people still tag Yu Mei-ren on new solo uploads of Xu Fu anyways!

All that being said, I must confess that I've been doing something of an annoying experiment spurred on by a lot of this discussion where I've been tagging individual ascensions for some characters who arguably don't need it. Fuuma Kotarou (Third Ascension) is actually useful, but fuuma_kotarou_(first_ascension)_(fate) and fuuma_kotarou_(second_ascension)_(fate) are basically the same. Are they two distinct costumes with individual names we could be applying to them? Yes, but does anybody actually care about searching for things that specifically?

Just because something can be tagged doesn't mean it should. Hence why we don't have tags for eyes, mouth, and arms, and why most font tags were nuked a while back.
If you're going to use FGO as your defense for very granular costume tags in that copyright or others, then I have to break the hard truth to you that I do not actually care for most of these granular tags and Fate as a franchise doesn't even have individual costume tags for every single slight variation. Otherwise, we would've split Nero Claudius (Modern Costume of Crimson) a long time ago, to distinguish between the very important difference of when she's wearing red boots and no hair flower versus sandals and a hair flower.

zetsubousensei said:

In this instance (Mario) no utility is gained that isn't already found via the copyright tags since Mario copytagging is so granular.

This line of thinking is one that assumes that the Mario series is a dead, inactive series, in which no new titles are being made, and no "outfits stuck to only one game" will ever return. Prior to Super Mario Odyssey, you could have argued that there's no point in making a mario_(golf) tag because you could just search "mario" combined with "nes_open_tournament_golf" and that'd narrow it down to that one incredibly American flag-themed golf ensemble outfit specifically. But then it got added to Super Mario Odyssey as an alternate costume, and then Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and so on. Same goes for Luigi, who had later had his stars and stripes golf outfit (luigi_(golf)) from NES Open Tournament Golf added to Mario Kart Tour, and then again in Mario Golf: Super Rush. Not everybody knows those outfits even originate from old NES games, especially those who have only ever played Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

The Mario series is very much alive. Let's say we go through with your nukes of all of these tags. Mario Kart World is a brand new game full of alternate outfits, and who's to say we won't get an update that adds Princess Daisy's Mario Golf: Super Rush outfit (princess_daisy_(super_rush)) and Luigi's Mario Tennis Aces (luigi_(tennis_aces)) outfit to the game, for example? Mario Kart World has a precedent, the base game has plenty of returning outfits from past Mario series titles (Most surprisingly, in my opinion, being Captain Wario from Game & Wario.). You'd have to re-tag everything that you untagged by nuking those character tags. This creates a messy and inefficient cycle of mass deletion and restoration, which is far more burdensome than simply future proofing by maintaining the correct tags from the start. The Mario Tennis Aces and Mario Golf: Super Rush outfits have technically already made a reappearance, as we have Mario (Mario Tennis Aces), Luigi (Mario Tennis Aces), Mario (Mario Golf: Super Rush), Luigi (Mario Golf: Super Rush), and Peach (Mario Golf: Super Rush) as Spirits in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Outfit tags are the easiest tags to tag, and the most useful for searches. If I see a character design I like I click a character tag. And if I see a specific outfit I like (which comprises the majority of the character design) I hope there's an outfit tag because the alternatives are terrible. Look and determine if it's the main outfit only in one sub-copyright, or come up with a tag cocktail that will never work because few posts are tagged 100% perfectly. And every part of the outfit isn't always present anyway.

The "outfit must have a name" rule seems like it exists to prevent the proliferation of these kind of tags, while standing in the way of usability. Azur Lane's Bremerton has an official dakimakura design post #8584622 -- maybe seems niche but it has more fanart than some of her named outfits all buried in the character tag. cowgirl (western) is barely used, gold bikini fails because it's frequently yellow bikini. Fortunately it's recognisably an eyepatch bikini and that will get you most of the way, but (a) not even the above post has the tag, and (b) you can't even identify it's an eyepatch bikini in the other art post #8584628

Meanwhile with an outfit tag, completely_nude solo_focus *_(*)_(azur_lane) can net you results where an outfit is identified from the hairstyle/accessories alone.

Anyway, Zelda's a problem because every game has a new design for its characters. It's iterative, and they're not really "outfits" in the same way. Mario characters designs have been consistent for years. They reuse the same outfit, you'll need additional context clues to give a specific copyright. Designing a new outfit for a game is significant. Luigi in his Aces gear is clearly an outfit.

Some of these discussed Mario outfits have appeared in multiple sub-series. Others work if you figure out the correct copyright (Rosalina's outfit is used in both her tennis games so you have to know you want the general mario tennis copyright, meanwhile Luigi appears in multiple tennis games but his tennis outfit is only in mario tennis aces... until the next tennis game)

But just because the copyright tags currently can give you almost the same results when everything's tagged correctly, there's an outfit tag that quite clearly tags a distinct design of a character. In a copyright that already uses outfit tags. These tags aren't a burden, they just fail your arbitrary test. Mario taggers are already used to tagging official alternate outfits. You want to remove outfit tags that perfectly fulfil their specific purpose because if we put extra burden on searchers they're still capable of finding them.

KalpacMuskoxen said:

Not everybody knows those outfits even originate from old NES games, especially those who have only ever played Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The Mario Tennis Aces and Mario Golf: Super Rush outfits have technically already made a reappearance, as we have Mario (Mario Tennis Aces), Luigi (Mario Tennis Aces), Mario (Mario Golf: Super Rush), Luigi (Mario Golf: Super Rush), and Peach (Mario Golf: Super Rush) as Spirits in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

I feel like I say this at least once every time you invoke Super Smash Bros., but no, I do not think trophies, stickers and spirits genuinely count. The Mario (Mario Tennis Aces) Spirit is not called Mario (Mario Tennis Aces) because it is saying that is Mario's Mario Tennis Aces costume, it's called Mario (Mario Tennis Aces) to disambiguate it from the Mario spirit, because it uses the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate render as opposed to the Mario Tennis Aces render. If they added a spirit of Mario's render from Super Mario Bros. 3 to Ultimate, they would've called it "Mario (Super Mario Bros. 3)" to distinguish from the Mario spirit - would you argue for a Mario (Super Mario Bros. 3) tag with your current logic even though Ultimate!Mario and SMB3!Mario look the same? Are you going to argue that Yoshi from Yoshi's Crafted World should get a unique chartag because the Yoshi (Yoshi's Crafted World) spirit exists?

KalpacMuskoxen said:

I'm sorry, but this is absolutely fucking ridiculous. Of all the games to use, Super Smash Bros. is, hands down, the worst fucking one to use, simply due to how the copytagging system for those games work. Even with that series in the mix (which it ain't, I checked), you'd still be tagging "Luigi Super Smash Bros. Mario Tennis Aces", so in the end it doesn't make it any actually harder to search for the costume using Luigi Mario_Tennis_Aces. This ends up proving the costume tag is superfluous because no one loses anything with the chartags being gone.

(Side note: I kinda have one-sided beef with Smash Bros. Tagging due to how it often dilutes my obscure Nintendo series searches, but that's both entirely a me problem and also not even unique to Danbooru (to the point my beef is mainly with an entirely different unrelated site because of how strict Danbooru copytagging tends to be). But here, it actually works in my favor, so I'll roll with it I guess.)

Mario Kart World is a brand new game full of alternate outfits, and who's to say we won't get an update that adds Daisy's Mario Golf: Super Rush outfit and Luigi's Mario Tennis Aces outfit to the game, for example? Mario Kart World has a precedent, the base game has plenty of returning outfits from past Mario series titles (Most surprisingly, in my opinion, being Captain Wario from Game & Wario.). You'd have to re-tag everything that you untagged by nuking those character tags. This creates a messy and inefficient cycle of mass deletion and restoration, which is far more burdensome than simply future proofing by maintaining the correct tags from the start.

Oh trust me, if that were to happen, fixing that would be very very easy, for the exact same reasons proving the tags need not exist right now. You severely overestimate the size of these tags and underestimate the sheer dedication of builders to their tagging crafts (Exhibit A: Me and you, for example). If, for some unfathomable reason they are reintroduced in the new Mario Kart World (something I personally find unlikely at the moment, but whatever), then this conversation can be reopened because circumstances would've changed then. It's also why I'm not bothering with a deprecation tagged onto my nuke, because I did think of that, for the record.

But that is talking in the context of a rather nebulous future at the time of writing. We are talking about the present, and at the present moment there is absolutely no reason to have these tags when a "Character + Game" search would net you the exact same results you wanted (for the exact reasons I did explain before, but Ylimegirl laid out much much better than me, thank you). On the off-chance the costumes do get reintroduced were the nuke goes through, I'll take the "I told you so", but as of the present moment, there's no reason to have them, and were there to ever come a point where they are needed, I'll repopulate them myself. I severely doubt we'll be stuck in an endless loop of nuking and recreating, especially over the sports' title outfits that never get anywhere near a hundred posts. Most of these tags don't even break double-digits, and the few that do don't come close to breaking three-digits either. This isn't like I'm proposing to nuke something the size of, say, Firefly (Spring Missive) (Honkai: Star Rail) for one. I repeat: Context is key.

Edit:

Damian0358 said:

I feel like I say this at least once every time you invoke Super Smash Bros., but no, I do not think trophies, stickers and spirits genuinely count. The Mario (Mario Tennis Aces) Spirit is not called Mario (Mario Tennis Aces) because it is saying that is Mario's Mario Tennis Aces costume, it's called Mario (Mario Tennis Aces) to disambiguate it from the Mario spirit, because it uses the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate render as opposed to the Mario Tennis Aces render. If they added a spirit of Mario's render from Super Mario Bros. 3 to Ultimate, they would've called it "Mario (Super Mario Bros. 3)" to distinguish from the Mario spirit - would you argue for a Mario (Super Mario Bros. 3) tag with your current logic even though Ultimate!Mario and SMB3!Mario look the same? Are you going to argue that Yoshi from Yoshi's Crafted World should get a unique chartag because the Yoshi (Yoshi's Crafted World) spirit exists?

Yeah, this too. But even if we were to assume your logic were sound, it wouldn't change anything.

Damian0358 said:

If they added a spirit of Mario's render from Super Mario Bros. 3 to Ultimate, they would've called it "Mario (Super Mario Bros. 3)" to distinguish from the Mario spirit - would you argue for a Mario (Super Mario Bros. 3) tag with your current logic even though Ultimate!Mario and SMB3!Mario look the same?

You've raised a fair point about the naming convention of Spirits in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate often serving as simple disambiguation. A hypothetical "Mario (Super Mario Bros. 3)" Spirit would indeed be named that way to distinguish its art source from the default "Mario" Spirit, even if the characters are visually identical.

However, the key difference with the sports outfits is that they represent visually distinct designs. The "Mario (Mario Tennis Aces)" Spirit isn't just a different render of default Mario; it's a specific, unique costume that Ultimate is officially recognizing and cataloging. This is what gives the design notability beyond its original game.

As the Mario Tennis Aces and Mario Golf: Super Rush outfits have not been given concise official names elsewhere, I am simply using what Super Smash Bros. Ultimate uses as a practical disambiguator. This is consistent with existing site practices. We already do this for tags like princess_peach_(yukata)_(super_mario_odyssey), princess_peach_(yukata)_(mario_kart_tour), princess_daisy_(swimwear)_(mario_kart_tour), princess_daisy_(swimwear)_(mario_kart_world), and so on. The outfits are distinct, they lack a simpler official name, so we use the game of origin as the qualifier. It's a logical and established method for ensuring tagging precision. There is no functional difference between that and what is being done with the sports outfits.

Damian0358 said:

Are you going to argue that Yoshi from Yoshi's Crafted World should get a unique chartag because the Yoshi (Yoshi's Crafted World) spirit exists?

Yes, I absolutely would, but not solely because of Ultimate. Yarn Yoshi is a distinct form of the character that exists well outside of Smash Bros. The series it originates from, Yoshi's Woolly World, and its successor Yoshi's Crafted World both explicitly feature Yarn Yoshi. Official merchandise for the character also refers to it as Yarn Yoshi. The form is a factually separate and officially named entity. The Super Smash Bros. Ultimate spirit merely uses "(Yoshi's Crafted World)" as its own internal disambiguation method, but this doesn't negate the form's established identity.

Knowledge_Seeker said:
Oh trust me, if that were to happen, fixing that would be very very easy... You severely overestimate the size of these tags... If, for some unfathomable reason they are reintroduced... then this conversation can be reopened...

This "nuke now, fix later" approach is fundamentally inefficient. It creates a cycle of unnecessary work: a mass update to remove tags, followed by the manual re-tagging of every single post if and when the design reappears. This is far more of a burden on taggers than simply maintaining the correct tag from the outset. Maintaining a tag is less work than nuking it and then recreating it. The system is already future-proof; your proposal would intentionally break that for no tangible long-term benefit.

Knowledge_Seeker said:
You're missing the point entirely. What you are doing is basically overcorrecting for a problem that is inherent in the system, as you'd still get false positives even with the tags...

This brings us back to the central disagreement. What you call "overcorrecting" and "tagging for tagging's sake," I and others call precision and utility. The existence of some unavoidable false positives is not an argument to intentionally create more of them by deleting the very tools designed to prevent them. That is a deeply pessimistic and self-defeating view of what a database should be.

KalpacMuskoxen said:

However, the key difference with the sports outfits is that they represent visually distinct designs. The "Mario (Mario Tennis Aces)" Spirit isn't just a different render of default Mario; it's a specific, unique costume that Ultimate is officially recognizing and cataloging. This is what gives the design notability beyond its original game.

Designs effortlessly searched for through a "Character + Game" search with 100% overlap with the chartags, rendering the tags useless.

Yes, I absolutely would, but not solely because of Ultimate. Yarn Yoshi is a distinct form of the character that exists well outside of Smash Bros. The series it originates from, Yoshi's Woolly World, and its successor Yoshi's Crafted World both explicitly feature Yarn Yoshi...

An alt form that has not shown up outside Yoshi's Woolly World or Crafted World (Smash Bros. notwithstanding), in a couple of tags that don't even break double-digits.

...I fail to see how this is necessary.

This "nuke now, fix later" approach is fundamentally inefficient...burden on taggers than simply maintaining the correct tag from the outset...nuking it and then recreating it...

Okay, that's enough snark on my end. Let's flip this around a little, shall we? Brace yourself.

Future-proofing or not, you are aware that people such as myself would probably be having a very different reaction if you had taken the favgroup approach or talked at all about making these tags prior to making them, no? What is the reason for that approach? Because in my eyes, this is the exact sort of inefficient thing you accuse me of doing here.

This all probably would've been a very different story had we discussed this prior, yanno? Had we elected to not have the tags and one of those scenarios you were trying to future proof came up, we could've then created them. And had we elected to have the tags, it wouldn't have caused the huge fuss that is this thread. I think it's far less efficient to have to deal with tags people never agreed to wanting or having at all in the first place, when this all could've easily been avoided by following typical protocol for these sorts of things.

This entire thread could have very easily been avoided by a single conversation. Now that is what I call inefficient, no matter the outcomes. Especially when we have no way of knowing if these costumes would ever explode in the future, and I'd much rather deal with it then than creating utterly redundant tags for costumes I doubt anyone actually searches for.

This brings us back to the central disagreement. What you call "overcorrecting" and "tagging for tagging's sake," I and others call precision and utility.

Do the people fighting for these tags actually use them, I wonder? And not for the sake of gardening. I'm very curious to know the actual answer, because I think it'd be very revealing, because whenever I get fired up over a tag I like going bye-bye, it's usually because I used the tag.

A lot of redundant tags are fought for, I think, because people cannot conceive of any other possible methodology beyond their mere presence. That's why people were upset to see the utterly useless bangs tag go in topic #23003, despite the fact that it applies to almost every post not under no humans on this site. Despite the fact no one actually uses them.

No one's search would be negatively impacted by these tags disappearing, let's put it that way. That's why these tags are useless, because they provide no actual utility Mario's highly granular copytagging doesn't already take of. Why not make use of that copytag system instead of making these redundant tags?

The existence of some unavoidable false positives is not an argument to intentionally create more of them by deleting the very tools designed to prevent them. That is a deeply pessimistic and self-defeating view of what a database should be.

But there is no utility or precision at all in a chartag with 100% overlap with a search literally anyone can perform, nor would it prevent false positives any better. Have you ever at all stopped to ponder the reason people are fighting so hard on this? Because chances are good it has nothing to do with a pessimistic view on things and more to do with people actually stopping to ponder the utility. A utility that I personally see as utterly non-existent.

KalpacMuskoxen said:

However, the key difference with the sports outfits is that they represent visually distinct designs. The "Mario (Mario Tennis Aces)" Spirit isn't just a different render of default Mario; it's a specific, unique costume that Ultimate is officially recognizing and cataloging. This is what gives the design notability beyond its original game.

The "Mario (Mario Tennis Aces)" Spirit is just a different render of default Mario, in the sense that Mario's default appearance in that game is that. Were it to actually have a name, it would've labeled it with that, but it doesn't. There's nothing about design notability implied here at all. It's just a simple distinction to make.

As the Mario Tennis Aces and Mario Golf: Super Rush outfits have not been given concise official names elsewhere, I am simply using what Super Smash Bros. Ultimate uses as a practical disambiguator. This is consistent with existing site practices. We already do this for tags like princess_peach_(yukata)_(super_mario_odyssey), princess_peach_(yukata)_(mario_kart_tour), princess_daisy_(swimwear)_(mario_kart_tour), princess_daisy_(swimwear)_(mario_kart_world), and so on. The outfits are distinct, they lack a simpler official name, so we use the game of origin as the qualifier. It's a logical and established method for ensuring tagging precision. There is no functional difference between that and what is being done with the sports outfits.

And this is not just conflating different tagging practices, but misreading the situation completely. Those costumes don't 'lack a simpler official name', their official names being simple is what forced the use of copytag qualifiers! Even if we didn't have a real official name for Peach's Yukata in Odyssey, it got one in World as simply Yukata, which directly conflicts with Mario Kart Tour's Peach (Yukata), and the same applies with Daisy's swimwear. If you didn't agree with this fact and insist on the costume qualifiers you initially used being 'practical disambiguators' then wouldn't you insist that they shouldn't need changing at all? You already conceded on that and have opted for more descriptive qualifiers as opposed to game titles because everyone viewed those as questionable when you intended them to apply beyond a singular game (not to mention the potential for those to also be ambiguous if there's more than one costume in the game, a point I raised in topic #32303).

Yes, I absolutely would, but not solely because of Ultimate. Yarn Yoshi is a distinct form of the character that exists well outside of Smash Bros. The series it originates from, Yoshi's Woolly World, and its successor Yoshi's Crafted World both explicitly feature Yarn Yoshi. Official merchandise for the character also refers to it as Yarn Yoshi. The form is a factually separate and officially named entity. The Super Smash Bros. Ultimate spirit merely uses "(Yoshi's Crafted World)" as its own internal disambiguation method, but this doesn't negate the form's established identity.

Here you're just talking around my point, so I'll instead interpolate. You're implicitly agreeing with my point here because you recognize Smash's use of the disambiguation, utilizing Crafted World's render for Yarn Yoshi, and understand that, even if this version of Yoshi didn't have that name, utilizing a copytag qualifier would be impractical the moment Crafted World released (I'm not gonna debate the validity of that tag in of itself as that's not relevant here). You recognize the absurdity of relying on Smash's disambiguations for costume tagging, but avoid fully admitting it because that would require conceding that you cannot use it to justify these tags' existence (something which you technically don't even need to do, since, as we've seen so far, utilizing Smash just puts you on a lot of scrutiny over just going "these are distinct costumes which are split between multiple sports copytags, so searching would require multiple ~, so it would be a good idea to put them together under a single tag", which would probably be enough of an argument for some people).

You keep talking about "but what if they get introduced some hypothetical gacha later and then we need to tag this variation" as if its the end of the world. If you get someone mentally ill enough when the time comes they'll be happy to catalogue that. Backtagging is not a huge ordeal if you know what you're looking for. the only reason my backtagging is becoming a months-long project is because for the most part I'm looking for official costumes that people may not have even realized exist in the first place. once i decide it's time for a certain costume to get a tag that's an easy script to bang out in like 10 minutes. You're futureproofing for a problem that may never arise at all. Are the hypothetical nuking + repopulating scenarios in the room with us now?

Not going to weigh in on the primary discussion at this time but it should be clarified that the Mario Kart Tour and Mario Kart World costume tag names mostly originate from the official names (so it's difficult to do something other than clarify with copyright, as the official names are the same for visually distinct appearances)

It's not really about futureproofing. It's that removing the outfit tags does no one any benefit. It makes it worse now for viewers who can't find the obvious tag to filter a design, it has almost zero effect on taggers who already expect to tag Mario alternate costumes, and it may be an effort for taggers in the future to repopulate it.

These copyright tags can get a viewer to an outfit (if they figure it out) with 95% accuracy. The outfit tag's purpose is obvious and specifically designed for getting a viewer to an outfit. These tags already exist. They exist within the context of Mario outfit tagging, where nearly every official costume is tagged.

Rosalina's main outfit in two games not getting a tag because a user is currently technically capable of using mario tennis where they will find the outfit they want, along with some bonus fan alts or the copyright applying to another aspect of the post--this might makes sense to you as an editor but makes zero sense to a viewer. A viewer wonders why Rosalina's tennis outfit doesn't have a tag, but obscure Luigi (Western Land) does.

Removing the tags might seem more reasonable in a copyright that didn't already have 95% official outfits tagged. As it stands, if an official outfit is pictured in a Mario post it is almost always tagged so the user can simply view all posts of the outfit. Not having certain outfits tagged on some technicality is weird UX.

Spatula22 said:

It's not really about futureproofing. It's that removing the outfit tags does no one any benefit. It makes it worse now for viewers who can't find the obvious tag to filter a design, it has almost zero effect on taggers who already expect to tag Mario alternate costumes, and it may be an effort for taggers in the future to repopulate it.

These copyright tags can get a viewer to an outfit (if they figure it out) with 95% accuracy. The outfit tag's purpose is obvious and specifically designed for getting a viewer to an outfit. These tags already exist. They exist within the context of Mario outfit tagging, where nearly every official costume is tagged.

Still not sure if these people who are actually searching for these tags exist, but it's worth noting that these tags in the BUR in question were all created in February of this year. They've existed for less than 6 months in total. But lets run the numbers, shall we?

Was there probably a way to script all this data analysis? Sure but I'm mentally ill so I did it manually so that's probably the reason for any errors. Conclusions are as follows:

• Very little tag pollution for most tags under 10 posts, as most of their corresponding copytags are also very low. Sometimes the tag pollution is zero!
• Most of these tags have been added to posts by KalpacMuskoxen, often 100% replacing existing tags that were already being used by the userbase. I find it interesting that even with tags that seem to have a 1:1 replacement that the solution was to simply tag it manually instead of submitting a BUR to alias/rename/merge/etc, as is generally protocol for changes to existing tags.
• The two actually arguably potentially useful tags, Princess Peach (Toadstool Tour) and Princess Daisy (Toadstool Tour), are both qualified with the game Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, of which our two posts on the site (duplicates of each other) doesn't feature either of them. Very unintuitive tag name!
• Most of these sports costumes were later reused for other sports. It feels very... nonsense using a Tennis Aces tag on a Mario Golf post.
• KalpacMuskoxen objectively messed up the Princess Daisy (Hoops 3-on-3) tag. If it needs to exist at all it doesn't, it should have had the qualifier be Basketball 3on3 to match the current existing copytag for the game.

(I have no real way of checking the search traffic for these tags, but I can't say I'm super optimistic about the traffic for these tags specifically considering the overall post counts and very low false positive rate for the copytag + chartag combo.)

Feels like these are pet tags of one user that feels like they have an extra-special right to have them continue to exist because they hijacked existing tags without going through the proper channels to replace existing tags and because their name is Purple. I didn't even fix Tenochtitlan (Over The Same Sky) earlier this week manually even though it was a blatantly obvious typo, I submitted a dang BUR!! And there's frankly no reason why you shouldn't have done the same back in February when you undertook this project in the first place.

Spatula22 said:

Rosalina's main outfit in two games not getting a tag because a user is currently technically capable of using mario tennis where they will find the outfit they want, along with some bonus fan alts or the copyright applying to another aspect of the post--this might makes sense to you as an editor but makes zero sense to a viewer. A viewer wonders why Rosalina's tennis outfit doesn't have a tag, but obscure Luigi (Western Land) does.

I'll be frank when I say that every argument applied here for the sports costumes applies to the Mario Party costume tags as well, in the "they don't have to exist" pile. Though for that discussion, we would have to summon @pc88 for comment (and honestly, I think they probably have something to say about all this too regardless).

Also, Ylime, thank you for reminding me of techgoose's existence via your above analysis (forum #269159), since even the tags Kalp replaced were seen as questionable at the time. Kalp likely only manually changed them due to their contention and the fact that they were made by a (set of) non-communicative member-level user(s).

Thanks for doing some number crunching, Ylime. That really helps put things into perspective regarding these tags, and while there is no way to check the traffic around them without an admin, I do think analyzing the tags' history does help a lot in explaining a lot of the issues here.

Ylimegirl said:

Feels like these are pet tags of one user that feels like they have an extra-special right to have them continue to exist because they hijacked existing tags without going through the proper channels to replace existing tags and because their name is Purple. I didn't even fix Tenochtitlan (Over The Same Sky) earlier this week manually even though it was a blatantly obvious typo, I submitted a dang BUR!! And there's frankly no reason why you shouldn't have done the same back in February when you undertook this project in the first place.

Yep, my thoughts too, and why I think many people (myself included) are much more annoyed by these tags' existence. If they had gone through the proper channels in the first place and survived, I probably would care significantly less about them existing or not. Because right now they're a part of the "do work on Danbooru" -> "Notice/Remember they exist" -> "get annoyed at them (whether due to missing implications or because I think the tags are unnecessary like here)" -> "make BUR to deal with them" cycle that is my messy thought process here.

Admittedly, I suspect it'd probably because they would've died had that been done, which is probably why the manual approach was taken here. Because trust me, if it were done back in Feburary, the idea of killing the tags would've been much less a contentious idea (for some reason, why do people care these tags exist?) and probably would've been my predicted outcome honestly. I understand the thought process, but that doesn't mean I like it one bit, especially as a "go down with her ship" kind of person when it comes to my tag creating process. Sometimes your tags get murdered. Sad and frustrating, but not the end of the world.

Damian0358 said:

I'll be frank when I say that every argument applied here for the sports costumes applies to the Mario Party costume tags as well, in the "they don't have to exist" pile. Though for that discussion, we would have to summon @pc88 for comment (and honestly, I think they probably have something to say about all this too regardless).

I'll be honest, I was very hesitant to upvote forum #369978, because I had no clue what the utility of the Mario Party 2 costume tags were. I decided to roll with it in the end because I couldn't think of any good reason to protest their existence, but that doesn't change the fact I wouldn't miss them were they to go. But right now, my priority is killing the tags currently on the chopping block (or reworking them, but I prefer outright killing them personally).

Ylimegirl said:

And there's frankly no reason why you shouldn't have done the same back in February when you undertook this project in the first place.

I will admit I fucked up on that one! You're right. I manually updated the previous sports-related tags back in February without submitting a Bulk Update Request. My rationale was to clean up a handful of vague, ambiguous tags. There are multiple "golf" costumes. And multiple "tennis" costumes. And those costumes are often used outside of those specific sports. So I tried to fix mistagged posts, as the same tags were being used for multiple different costumes. However, I concede that bypassing the established forum process was a mistake. My intention was to standardize and improve what was already there, not to create "pet tags" in a vacuum, but I understand now how my actions came across that way. That was my error, and I apologize.

Spatula22 said:

It's not really about futureproofing. It's that removing the outfit tags does no one any benefit. It makes it worse now for viewers who can't find the obvious tag to filter a design, it has almost zero effect on taggers who already expect to tag Mario alternate costumes, and it may be an effort for taggers in the future to repopulate it.

These copyright tags can get a viewer to an outfit (if they figure it out) with 95% accuracy. The outfit tag's purpose is obvious and specifically designed for getting a viewer to an outfit. These tags already exist. They exist within the context of Mario outfit tagging, where nearly every official costume is tagged.

Rosalina's main outfit in two games not getting a tag because a user is currently technically capable of using mario tennis where they will find the outfit they want, along with some bonus fan alts or the copyright applying to another aspect of the post--this might makes sense to you as an editor but makes zero sense to a viewer. A viewer wonders why Rosalina's tennis outfit doesn't have a tag, but obscure Luigi (Western Land) does.

Removing the tags might seem more reasonable in a copyright that didn't already have 95% official outfits tagged. As it stands, if an official outfit is pictured in a Mario post it is almost always tagged so the user can simply view all posts of the outfit. Not having certain outfits tagged on some technicality is weird UX.

Oh. Wait! I forgot casual users existed! That changes everything!

Okay, fellow users. Let's pretend we are a grass-touching normie that doesn't eat and breathe Danbooru.

Let's say I don't know many Mario games. I don't know "the gacha game rule" - a rule that the Mario series routinely breaks with huge ensemble alternate costume games like Mario Kart World, which is not a gacha game, but also follows with Mario Kart Tour, which is a gacha game. Why do I have to suddenly be an expert on the series to know why some costumes have tags and some don't? Why do I need to suddenly need to know the exact game that a costume originates from in order to find that costume when searching, instead of just clicking on a costume tag?

Let's look at post #8466778 through the eyes of someone that wasn't even born when Mario Party 2 came out. I didn't even know this outfit was a reference to a game until I was reading up on the Super Mario Wiki when I was making new costume tags. I added the Mario Party 2 tag and made a costume tag after I did extensive third-party homework. But let's say for the sake of this thought experiment, I followed our policy and I didn't make a costume tag for it.

(These are thoughts of NormieMcNormington, hypothetical casual Danbooru browser.)

"I see Luigi wearing an safari-looking costume and Princess Daisy wearing a tiger costume. Why is it tagged Mario Party 2? Does Princess Daisy wear a tiger costume in that game? I wish the tags gave me more context. Let me Google it."

"Oh, I see. After reading the Super Mario Wiki, I have learned that every board in Mario Party 2 features the characters wearing different outfits. Does Princess Daisy wear a tiger costume in this game?"

"Oh, it doesn't look like Daisy is in this game. It must be Luigi then. Where does he wear that explorer outfit?"

"Oh, it appears in Mystery Land. Why doesn't this costume have a tag?"

"Oh, it was a one-off and costume and hasn't appeared in any game since."

"Oh, and it didn't get any official name."

"Maybe I should tag it anyways so people know what is being referenced here. Let me read up on tagging policy."

"Oh, I spent thirty minutes looking through forum posts, and apparently according to Danbooru policy only gacha games get unique costume tags. But Super Mario Odyssey and Mario Kart World aren't gacha games."

"Oh! It's because those games have a lot of costumes."

"But doesn't Mario Party 2 have a lot of costumes? I'm confused now."

"I'm going to read a whole bunch of forum posts and learn completely arbitrary rules that are set on a per-game basis. I'm going to be an absolute pro at navigating costumes after reading up on Danbooru policy!"

"Oh, that's weird. They're arguing that we should nuke a whole bunch of Mario costume tags because I should know the game that they came from, and that I need to be searching for multiple tags at a time instead of clicking on a costume tag like I do with all of the other costume tags. How foolish of me!"

Like... at the end of the day, isn't user experience the most important part? Like, why is this even a point of contention? From an outsider's view, this entire thread's existence is completely incomprehensible.

Damian0358 said:

However, I'm with Knowledge and Zets on your misapplication of evazion's words: he did not say those things in the context of every copyright on Danbooru

OH! And I did more digging. Here's a recent and infinitely more relevant post from Evazion, which is actually essentially the same argument, which has the added bonus of defending costumes with non-official names. (Which everybody ignored, I might add. It is STILL a royal pain in the ass to look up country-themed Mikus.)

evazion said:

If it's a unique design and it has more than one post, it should get a tag. This idea that a character needs a certain number of posts before it deserves a tag, or that it doesn't deserve a tag if it's not official, needs to die. If I'm looking at a picture of Puerto Rican Miku and there are more like it out there, don't make me jump through hoops to find them. Just make a tag so I can find them in one click.

Don't make me do something like worldwide_miku puerto_rico. A regular user is not going to be able to figure that out. Even as an experienced user, it takes time for me to figure out how to formulate the search, and typing in the tags is too much work to actually do. Without a tag you wouldn't even know to search for it, because you wouldn't know that multiple Puerto Rican Miku posts even exist. Half the point of a tag is to point out "there are more posts like this and you can find them by clicking here". The other half is so that you can write a wiki explaining the tag, so that five years from now when the meme is dead and forgotten, people know where the hell these characters came from.

I will concede that there is literally only one post with Luigi (Mystery Land) as of this moment, but every tag in this nuke proposal has over one post. Daisy's Toadstool Tour outfit has 89 posts alone. Her Super Rush outfit has 23 posts. Proposing to nuke her Super Rush outfit, which is 21 posts over that "two post minimum" is bonkers. Searching for costumes should be a one-click experience.

KalpacMuskoxen said:

I will admit I fucked up on that one! You're right. I manually updated the previous sports-related tags back in February without submitting a Bulk Update Request. My rationale was to clean up a handful of vague, ambiguous tags. There are multiple "golf" costumes. And multiple "tennis" costumes. And those costumes are often used outside of those specific sports. So I tried to fix mistagged posts, as the same tags were being used for multiple different costumes. However, I concede that bypassing the established forum process was a mistake. My intention was to standardize and improve what was already there, not to create "pet tags" in a vacuum, but I understand now how my actions came across that way. That was my error, and I apologize.

And also forgot to deal with the wikis, orphaning them.

OH! And I did more digging. Here's a recent and infinitely more relevant post from Evazion, which is actually essentially the same argument, which has the added bonus of defending costumes with non-official names. (Which everybody ignored, I might add. It is STILL a royal pain in the ass to look up country-themed Mikus.)

Kalp, I know you're trying to keep your argument consistent, but have you actually looked at the Worldwide Miku searches? I'll use worldwide_miku united_states as my example here: if you look at that search, you will find multiple United States Mikus, so making a United States Miku tag wouldn't make sense because it is not in fact focusing on a unique design. And those unique designs which have multiple posts did get their own tags: American Miku (Molenaide), Midwestern Miku (Knic Toons), Cajun Miku (Dreamscreep), etc. That's why everyone 'ignored' what evazion said, because what he said doesn't work for any Worldwide Miku beyond the super viral ones based on the work of multiple artists (read: Brazilian and Argentinian Miku), as you'd otherwise need to add an artist qualifier to disambiguate. And no one wants to make a bunch of one-post Worldwide Miku chartags that'll never get any more art, whether it be by the artist who designed it or otherwise, because giving them tags in that case doesn't make it any more searchable than having it under the worldwide_miku [country_tag] search. And no, your take that Super Crown rules apply to Worldwide Miku is still invalid in my eyes (for anyone lacking context, and also seeking the source of the evazion quote, please read topic #28605).

I'd also argue this doesn't really defend costumes with non-official names at all; if you wanted an evazion defense of that, you could've just gone to the VTuber costume thread and seen how he and NNT have increasingly pushed for folks to alias costume tags utilizing the nth costume qualifier format to descriptive qualifiers instead, even if those descriptives aren't official, because they're viewed as more intuitively searchable. I'm sure one of the topics I linked to last page has at least one BUR approved where the costume tag uses a non-official descriptive qualifier for the costume in question as well, because everything with costumes has at least one costume which is probably merch-only or probably even a fan design that becomes popular enough to warrant tagging for ease of access.

Oh. Wait! I forgot casual users existed! That changes everything!

Okay, fellow users. Let's pretend we are a grass-touching normie that doesn't eat and breathe Danbooru.

...

"Maybe I should tag it anyways so people know what is being referenced here. Let me read up on tagging policy."

The average casual user doesn't even have an account on Danbooru to be able to tag with and doesn't even consider checking things like 'the forum', and you're making it very obvious that you're just injecting your mindset into this hypothetical user, as well as the fact that you've not paid attention to what I said earlier by calling it "the gacha game rule," when a) it's never been just for gachas, because MOBAs are not gachas; b) Odyssey and World have selectable costumes, Mario Party does not - you cannot choose your costumes in that game, it's chosen for you when you go somewhere; gacha or otherwise, the vast majority of costume tags are ones you can choose and switch between; those that aren't are currently the exception to the norm in practice, and we've yet to see whether the norm will shift to feature it.

Honestly the fact that you chose Toadstool Tour as your qualifier is really stupid, especially when the current gallery for Princess Peach lists that costume as Sports Dress, which is leagues more descriptive. It also lists Princess Peach (Summer Sports) as Sports Shorts, when these tags are almost identical. Squishing the two into a Princess Peach (Athletic) might be the way to go, with people who actually care about the differences can use skirt or shorts to clarify. We could probably get away with throwing in Princess Peach (Golf) while we're at it (or as the gallery calls it, "Classic Sports"). It's not a great sign that most of these tags up for nuking were never added to the main gallery at all to begin with (that or they were removed by someone else if you added it ever. Which is your responsibility to do, btw.)

KalpacMuskoxen said:

You're grasping at straws by this point. And have been for a while, I've noticed. It's okay to just let the BURs run their course if you got no other arguments.

I will concede that there is literally only one post with Luigi (Mystery Land) as of this moment, but every tag in this nuke proposal has over one post. Daisy's Toadstool Tour outfit has 89 posts alone. Her Super Rush outfit has 23 posts. Proposing to nuke her Super Rush outfit, which is 21 posts over that "two post minimum" is bonkers. Searching for costumes should be a one-click experience.

Oh you sweet summer child, the person proposing the nuke is responsible for the nuking of tags like light blue hair (which were far more contested than these). You think tag size really matters here? Tag size alone does not define a useful tag. A lot of nuked tags got thousands of posts in them. But they still were slain, for reasons such as "being too ambiguous", "nobody is searching this tag, only adding it", or "we are lumping all these things together for no reason", and so on. These tags are one such case.

But in any case, these tags are actually pretty mild compared to some of the tags I had a hand in the demise of. I think these are actually more straight-forward a case than those nuke proposals, actually.

Damian0358 said:

The average casual user doesn't even have an account on Danbooru to be able to tag with and doesn't even consider checking things like 'the forum', and you're making it very obvious that you're just injecting your mindset into this hypothetical user, as well as the fact that you've not paid attention to what I said earlier by calling it "the gacha game rule," when a) it's never been just for gachas, because MOBAs are not gachas; b) Odyssey and World have selectable costumes, Mario Party does not - you cannot choose your costumes in that game, it's chosen for you when you go somewhere; gacha or otherwise, the vast majority of costume tags are ones you can choose and switch between; those that aren't are currently the exception to the norm in practice, and we've yet to see whether the norm will shift to feature it.

Indeed, the casual user gives zero fucks about the forums like we do (to the point I saw a friend offbooru curious about the site offhandedly ask if people argue over tags like blue hair). If you're lucky, they'll check the wiki, and it's very rare to get someone who'd actually come into the forum without the sort of mindset that creates builders like everyone bickering here. Trust me, people do not care. And if someone does notice, the most I've seen is amusement, confusion, or annoyance.

Anyway, I think we'll have to tackle what to do with these Mario Party 2 costume tags. But I think that can be done once a final decision is made with the BURs currently running here (which we can then use as precedent). I'm not sure what to do with them myself right now, but I can at least come up with an argument for their existence (albeit not a good one), unlike these tags.

Ylimegirl said:

Honestly the fact that you chose Toadstool Tour as your qualifier is really stupid, especially when the current gallery for Princess Peach lists that costume as Sports Dress, which is leagues more descriptive. It also lists Princess Peach (Summer Sports) as Sports Shorts, when these tags are almost identical. Squishing the two into a Princess Peach (Athletic) might be the way to go, with people who actually care about the differences can use skirt or shorts to clarify. We could probably get away with throwing in Princess Peach (Golf) while we're at it (or as the gallery calls it, "Classic Sports"). It's not a great sign that most of these tags up for nuking were never added to the main gallery at all to begin with (that or they were removed by someone else if you added it ever. Which is your responsibility to do, btw.)

If the issue some people have with my nuke proposal is with the Princess Peach (Toadstool Tour) and Princess Daisy (Toadstool Tour) tags, then good news! Those are, indeed, easily the most salvagable of all the tags in here. While I personally don't see the tags going bye-bye as any real loss as is, if that's the issue here, I can actually see them being able to reworked into something actually helpful as opposed to being a "Character + Game" shortcut in disguise reading some of the responses here (like for example, if they were handled the way being suggested here, they could be used to search for a variety of sports outfits for a character across various Mario Sports titles, which I actually think would be legitimately useful as opposed to arbitrarily split up based on subtle differences no one who'd actually want to see these actually cares about) I just am not really sure of their actual utility even with reworking, but I can at least see someone actually wanting a tag like I just described for Peach and Daisy, especially if the sports' game they come from is very ambiguous (which would be another good reason to go with Ylime's suggestion, and would make the tags actually useful).

...There, I just came up with a legitimate argument for the tags' existence. Let that be my argument for if we'd like to rework these two tags specifically (as I've been meaning to figure out something with that Princess Peach (Summer Sports) tag we got lying around). God, that is a really bad qualifier. Even if the tags can be salvaged, that qualifier is so very misleading.

...Don't think of this as me suddenly switching sides, as the rest are still completely useless pad tags. I just don't want to pull the trigger on a couple tags that could potentially have utility. Which is why these should've been talked about back in Feburary, because instead we are doing it now.

...So would those tags be worth attempting to salvage? That's my question, because if so, how should we go about this?

Ylimegirl said:

Honestly the fact that you chose Toadstool Tour as your qualifier is really stupid, especially when the current gallery for Princess Peach lists that costume as Sports Dress, which is leagues more descriptive.

I don't think this is a fair point to make, since he clearly decided to list the post-BUR names with the belief his BUR will get approved in a 'these tags don't get nuked" scenario.

It's not a great sign that most of these tags up for nuking were never added to the main gallery at all to begin with (that or they were removed by someone else if you added it ever. Which is your responsibility to do, btw.)

This is though.

It also lists Princess Peach (Summer Sports) as Sports Shorts, when these tags are almost identical. Squishing the two into a Princess Peach (Athletic) might be the way to go, with people who actually care about the differences can use skirt or shorts to clarify. We could probably get away with throwing in Princess Peach (Golf) while we're at it (or as the gallery calls it, "Classic Sports").

Well, if you squashed them all together, you could just go with (sports) at that point, since there'd be no ambiguity.