Danbooru

Tag cleanup: arm raising

Posted under General

Alignn said:
Yes, but do we need to make that distinction? We don't have sock vs socks for instance.
It could certainly be considered more relevant here since it's a gesture, but I wanted to bring it up.

I like the distinction between tagging one or two raised arms.

What I don't like โ€” but is easily fixable โ€” is that the distinction technically is only mentioned in the wiki of arm up, not of arms up.

Also, in my opinion, much better names would be single arm up and both arms up. There are a few precedents, including single glove and single sock; compare with glove and sock.

The current names "arm up" and "arms up" aren't equivalent to each other, but really seem to be. (much like "book"/"books", "glove"/"gloves", etc.) One must read the wiki of arm up to understand accurately its purpose.

Somewhat interestingly, someone populated one arm raised with 2 posts (post #229758 and post #229756). I moved them to arm up.

Updated

Rampardos said:
One arm up and two arms up are completely different gestures, so there's definitely merit in keeping them distinct.

Also +1 to single arm up / both arms up.

Thanks for supporting (or "+1ing") that suggestion.

It does not take multiple arms into account, however. Exemple of four arms up: post #257201.

That said, I wouldn't worry too much about which of them are "up", for tagging purposes. We only have 14 images tagged multiple arms in the first place; and none of them is also tagged arm up or arms up.

Updated

Adding an explicit "single" or "one" is used for tags that are assumed to/commonly occur in pairs, like socks and gloves.
There's nothing to be gained from adding it to the arm(s)_up tags.

I've gone through the arm-related wikis and cleaned them up a bit. Changed topic to reflect the broader scale.

SystemXS said:
Adding an explicit "single" or "one" is used for tags that are assumed to/commonly occur in pairs, like socks and gloves.
There's nothing to be gained from adding it to the arm(s)_up tags.

I disagree with you. I'll explain, by repeating and elaborating what I already said. Please read it.

Most tags are singular nouns

We have the rule of standardizing the majority of noun tags on the singular form (forum #14788), while we know most of these can actually represent any quantity. When I see a tag "book", my automatic conclusion could be accurately translated as "there must be any number of books in this image". If 3 books are drawn together and tagged book, it would be perfectly natural.

Arm/arms distinction

Tags of arms and hands are different in that they are separated into "singular only"/"plural only" tags, this way:

...but I don't think we should merely rely on the presence or lack of the final -s for this purpose, per the aforementioned example of "book".

If the tag is singular and unexplained, it usually implies that any quantity is acceptable. In fact, all these tags have posts that fit only their counterpart.

For example, post #1036964 depicts multiple mechanical arms and is tagged mechanical arm. Why shouldn't it?

Danielx21 said:
The current names "arm up" and "arms up" aren't equivalent to each other, but really seem to be. (much like "book"/"books", "glove"/"gloves", etc.) One must read the wiki of arm up to understand accurately its purpose.

Oneness

The examples I gave ("single sock", "single glove") were deliberately of things always expected to come in pairs. If some drawn girl is wearing only one sock, she is assymetrycal, she is conpicuous, she draws attention; thus, that "oneness" should be taggable.

Differently, raised arms ("arms up") commonly come in pairs, but are not expected to. If some girl is with only one hand raised, she does not look assymetrical, that "oneness" is not conspicuous. Yet, we still tag it as a notable posture.

What single arms up and single gloves have in common is that their oneness is taggable, not that they are expected to be in pairs always. My reasoning is: "If the oneness is taggable, it should always be mentioned in the tag name by a word such as 'single' or 'one', whichever is the most appropriate; otherwise, people who don't know or don't remember the wiki are very likely to make mistakes when reading, searching or tagging with that tag โ€” even if many other people are active in the forums and already have the discipline and interest to remember well quirks like 'but just this tag works differently'."

A list of tags

Assuming we want to keep this important distinction of singular/plural among all tags of arms (I, personally, would prefer merging some of them instead, maybe in a different discussion) and that the tags are renamed according to my arguments, they would work this way:

  • single_arm_up
    • (because "arm up" could include posts with both arms raised, too; in fact, post #1042246 and many other posts depict both arms raised and are tagged arm up... that feels completely natural when I ignore the wiki and the related discussions)
  • single_outstretched_arm
    • ("outstretched arm" could include posts with both arms stretched out, too; and it does)

These are some good precendents, followed by the same short analyses.

Updated

Disagree or not, SystemXS is correct, plural tags occur for things that occur in natural pairs and single tags for such things that have natural pairs only exist for things that have said natural pair aliases. Single <-> Plural aliases are site policy going back 2+ years.

Unless your argument is that we need to alias arm up to arms up and make single arm up to take over for what was previously arm up because arms being raised occurs in natural pairs it's just change for the sake of change.

SystemXS said:
Adding an explicit "single" or "one" is used for tags that are assumed to/commonly occur in pairs, like socks and gloves.

Danielx21 said:
We have the rule of standardizing the majority of noun tags on the singular form (forum #14788), while we know most of these can actually represent any quantity. When I see a tag "book", my automatic conclusion could be accurately translated as "there must be any number of books in this image". If 3 books are drawn together and tagged book, it would be perfectly natural.

Log said:
Disagree or not, SystemXS is correct, plural tags occur for things that occur in natural pairs and single tags for such things that have natural pairs only exist for things that have said natural pair aliases. Single <-> Plural aliases are site policy going back 2+ years.

While Log and SystemXS support the basic idea of keeping arm up and arms up, one talked about restrictions of use of single/one and the other talked about the role of singular/plural aliases.

For anyone who is not a follower of tl;dr, I suggest checking out the rest of this conversation, too, since it is interesting.

Log, I acknowledge what has been done these years. I even explained the context, in a rather condescending/didactical tone. I more-or-less had to do that in order to request a change.

So, just re-explaining that the current (and past) situation is different from the suggested improvements is not adding much to this conversation.

Shinjidude said:
I second Log here, it's a similar situation to hand on hip as opposed to hands on hips. I don't think any change is needed.

These are different. I'd rather leave "hand on hip" and "hands on hips" unchanged now and in the foreseeable future... Because they are much clearer, much more intuitive and their thousands of posts are much more accurately tagged than the ones of "arm up" and "arms up".

Log said:
Unless your argument is that we need to alias arm up to arms up and make single arm up to take over for what was previously arm up because arms being raised occurs in natural pairs it's just change for the sake of change.

No, actually not. I would rather have these aliases:

  • arm up, arm_above, arm_raised, raised_arm -> single_arm_up
  • arms up, arms_above, arms_raised, raised_arms -> both_arms_up

That way, we can type the shorter "arm_up" and still see the more explanatory result "single_arm_up" listed among the tags of a post. It would even be close to other "single_*" tags in the alphabetical order.

This simple system is similar to what happens when I use the ambiguous hand_on_chest: it expands to the more specific hand_on_another's_chest. So, if I use hand_on_chest believing that it means "hand on one's own chest" instead, my mistagging becomes automatically very visible and likely to be fixed.

Similarly, post #895040 and post #1043400 are wrongly tagged arm up; if they were tagged single arm up instead, the mistake would be much more obvious to anyone.

I would love to see support ("+1"), for my ideas, from more people.

Updated

If there's support for it I can see doing:
arm up, arm_above, arm_raised, raised_arm -> single_arm_up (or one_arm_up?)
arms up, arms_above, arms_raised, raised_arms -> both_arms_up

But the tags work perfectly fine as they are too, in my opinion.

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