Sorting out lavender tags

BUR #3216 has been approved by @evazion.

rename lavender_hair -> light_purple_hair
rename lavender_eyes -> light_purple_eyes

If we have to have "lavender" hair, then we should at least have unambiguous names for it. I'm not going to argue for nuking these tags because it's been tried many times over the years and that argument is never going to go anywhere, so instead I'm proposing moving them to a better named tag as previously suggested to try and fix the current mess.

Currently "lavender" means nothing and everything. A small sample of randomly selected posts from the first page of results of lavender hair (to various degrees of NSFW):
post #4037520
post #4040154
post #4032756
post #4014522
post #4014221

Notice how different these posts are from Wikipedia's definition of lavender, which is lightish purple tending to grey. Of the many variants of lavender Wikipedia offers, the majority is varying shades of purple.

A lot of these posts are actually just grey hair/silver hair, blue hair or pink hair. Changing the name of the tag to something clear would force people to properly tag these colors, while aliasing would just move the issue to another tag and wouldn't solve anything.

Tag gardening can proceed if the BUR is accepted, there's no need to do it beforehand since again, this would be just a tag move.

Previous topics:

• topic #13860 (in which the argument to move this tag to light purple was made, in particular forum #128881) - here the argument (forum #128910) was that lavender means "light purple" so there is no need for a change as the meaning should be evident. I argue instead that the average user cannot be trusted to know what "lavender" means, as shown by a brief glance at the results of those tags.
• topic #14522
• topic #4426 (even 10 years ago people wanted to nuke this tag).

As for the rest of the lavender tags, imo we should just nuke them into purple, pink and elsewhere since they are irrelevant in size, but the argument on whether to change them too to light purple or nuke them can wait till this is resolved since again, they are so small in size compared to the hair tag that they don't really count in the discussion.

EDIT: The bulk update request #3216 (forum #170895) has been approved by @evazion.

The bulk update request #3216 (forum #170895) has been approved by @evazion.

I floated the idea of light and dark hair color tags before, as a compromise to at least make the names clearer, but I kind of regret it now after seeing these tags spread. The problem with color tags is that they're basically memes. They spread everywhere. For hair colors, we started out with just light brown hair, but that led to other hair colors (light blue hair and dark blue hair), and then that spread to eye colors (light brown eyes and light blue eyes), then finally it spread to clothing colors (light blue dress, etc). We had a bunch of light blue clothing tags until a few months ago, when I nuked them to keep the meme from spreading. We had things like light blue pubic hair and light blue skirt and it was really excessive.

So my concern is, by renaming this to light purple hair, it's going to lead to more color tags being created. People are going to see that things like light purple hair, light brown hair, and light blue hair exist, and they'll take it as a license to create light/dark tags for other hair colors, then eventually light/dark tags for clothing colors.

evazion said:

I floated the idea of light and dark hair color tags before, as a compromise to at least make the names clearer, but I kind of regret it now after seeing these tags spread. The problem with color tags is that they're basically memes. They spread everywhere. For hair colors, we started out with just light brown hair, but that led to other hair colors (light blue hair and dark blue hair), and then that spread to eye colors (light brown eyes and light blue eyes), then finally it spread to clothing colors (light blue dress, etc). We had a bunch of light blue clothing tags until a few months ago, when I nuked them to keep the meme from spreading. We had things like light blue pubic hair and light blue skirt and it was really excessive.

So my concern is, by renaming this to light purple hair, it's going to lead to more color tags being created. People are going to see that things like light purple hair, light brown hair, and light blue hair exist, and they'll take it as a license to create light/dark tags for other hair colors, then eventually light/dark tags for clothing colors.

I am very much in agreement, I have myself been killing light/dark colour variants of tags because it just seems excessive to go that far, I think it applies even for hair colours but I can understand them being a different story even though I'd rather restrict them to just single versions as well.

Hi, sorry to revive an old discussion but, since this change was done, shouldn't we also alias lavender_hair/eyes to Light_purple?

Was trying to tag a hair color today and couldn't find the tag anymore till i searched the forum.
Only for hair and eyes that is, the color still exists for dress, skirt, nails etc.