ambiguous tag 'backbone'

this tag backbone seems to be getting used for two different purposes:
- a line on the skin which appears over the spine, such as in post #4996386 . essentially the back equivalent of linea_alba.
- an exoskeleton spine such as in post #3334611 (which may be mechanical or organic)

for the exoskeleton case, i'm not sure if an umbrella tag is really necessary to cover the handful of cases where we already have tags such as mechanical_spine, spine and exoskeleton.
otherwise a tag such as external_spine or exospine may be appropriate. ideally something that's not easily confused with exposed_bone (exposed_spine)

for the skin line case it seems highly under-tagged -- though if there's some other tag already for this, i haven't been able to find it.
i'd be in favour of moving these cases to a more specific tag. however i haven't been able to find the correct name for this anatomical feature -- some sources refer to it as the 'vertebral line'. if anyone knows the correct name that would be helpful.

whatever approach we take for those cases, i suggest we write a disambiguation wiki page for backbone.

thoughs?

A glance at the history of this tag reveals that it was originally used alongside mechanical_backbone, where it was essentially redundant and had no apparent purpose other than to inflate tag counts. There are about 50 posts that were tagged this way.

Then mechanical_backbone was aliased to mechanical_spine in topic #18297, but backbone was ignored. If it had been noticed at the time, it probably would have been nuked, but instead it was left alone without a wiki or clear purpose.

A few months later, it was appropriated by other taggers to denote the posterior median furrow, i.e. the valley between the muscles of the back (esp. the trapezius) at the site of their attachment to the spine. I don't particularly like the term "backbone" for this, because it isn't a protruding bone in the way collarbone and hip_bones are. Also, I'm concerned that this term could be confused by ESL taggers as some sort of umbrella tag for any bones that are prominent on the back, such as the shoulder blades.

My recommendation is to remove backbone altogether from the mechanical_spine posts. It was never useful there; anyone wanting to find actual spines can search for spine, and anyone wanting to find mechanical ones can search for mechanical_spine.

As for instances like post #5040993, if we deem it necessary to tag these lines at all, it should be with something other than backbone. It's an ambiguous term, and as I mentioned, that line isn't really a bone. The actual anatomical term is a bit of a mouthful though, so other suggestions would be welcome. I'm not opposed to going with "vertebral line" if that's what most users find easiest to remember.

i definitely agree about removing it from the mechanical_spine posts

good to know the 'posterior median furrow' does have a name, but yeah something with a better balance between being memorable and being anatomically-accurate, would be ideal — i think vertebral_line would be acceptable if we include some aliases to make it easier to find (perhaps spinal_line)

The issue for spine is that it's an undefined tag and half of it is skeletons, invisible skin or gore. It's not immediate that it can also apply to the back of naked ladies. We should really differentiate between actual skeleton spines and vertebrae visible through skin.

That said, I don't think we need a tag like backbone. It risks ending up like collarbone: completely useless because it's drowned by pendantic users mass adding it to every single post where it's remotely visible. It's one of those tags that only exist because someone decided to obsess over every single useless detail of an image. To find pictures of backbones you'd have better luck just searching for back.

nonamethanks said:

That said, I don't think we need a tag like backbone. It risks ending up like collarbone: completely useless because it's drowned by pendantic users mass adding it to every single post where it's remotely visible. It's one of those tags that only exist because someone decided to obsess over every single useless detail of an image. To find pictures of backbones you'd have better luck just searching for back.

but consider we currently have:
stomach + linea_alba (vertical line over stomach),
so wouldn't it make sense to have the equivalent:
back + <new tag name> (vertical line over back)
?

bipface said:

but consider we currently have:
stomach + linea_alba (vertical line over stomach),
so wouldn't it make sense to have the equivalent:
back + <new tag name> (vertical line over back)
?

Almost every single post under bare back has that line. I struggled to find even one that didn't in the first few hundred posts. I'd rather nip this in the bud rather than having yet another padding tag functionally identical to three others.

nonamethanks said:

That said, I don't think we need a tag like backbone. It risks ending up like collarbone: completely useless because it's drowned by pendantic users mass adding it to every single post where it's remotely visible.

Yeah, that's another point I stopped short of mentioning. When I looked over the more recent backbone posts, there were several (post #4033959 in particular) that stood out as so subtle, the tagger must have given themself eyestrain trying to find it. If anyone actually wanted to see a "backbone", surely they wouldn't want such posts in their search results.

BUR #8625 has been approved by @evazion.

mass update favgroup:12607 -> -backbone

well to start with i've gathered all the backbone posts which only have an exospine (no vertebral line visible), so go ahead and vote on that

The bulk update request #8625 (forum #204234) has been approved by @evazion.

wiki page proposal:

( + add to list_of_disambiguation_pages )

--

well, at this point we're now left with the backbone tag populated by only posts with the vertebral line;
whether to nuke it or rename it, personally i don't really mind,
though i struggle to understand how anyone could be opposed to having a vertebral line tag but not opposed to having linea_alba