Purpose of artist_request tag

EB said:
Why not make a wiki entry?

RaisingK said:
just make renaming/merging artist pages more annoying.

Having to check with the Useless Wiki thread each time...

EB said:
Regardless of whether a wiki entry is created or not, DO make sure that the link to an artist's Pixiv profile is included somewhere. It's rare, but there are sometimes cases when an artist deletes all of his or her images on Pixiv that have been uploaded here but still has their account with possibly some other images.

Yeah. I wrote a program to fill in the gaps in the artist pages, so as long as either an image URL or a profile link is on the artist page, my program will supply the other, assuming the links are still valid.

RaisingK said:
Having to check with the Useless Wiki thread each time...

If the old name has been there for a while and/or had a lot of posts (even without, I think it should be OK, but whatever...), the best thing to do is to replace it with a simple "See..." note link to correct page and not worry about deleting it.

Yeah. I wrote a program to fill in the gaps in the artist pages, so as long as either an image URL or a profile link is on the artist page, my program will supply the other, assuming the links are still valid.

Thank you. That should be very helpful.

葉月 said:
Removing the #####.jpg is completely unnecessary, the system systematically chops off URL components already if it can't find matches.

I know, but I do it anyway because it looks better, at least to me.

I apologize about the wiki entry thing. For some bizarre reason I thought it was necessary but that's wrong, just editing the artist entry once like Algasir said is enough to make it work.

RaisingK said: No, don't make any wiki entries, please. A very few have useful additional information, but most are redundant regurgitations of the artist entry URL list that just make renaming/merging artist pages more annoying.

I know you personally have a thing against artist wikis (e.g. the "Notes" field), but please don't tell other people not to do it. I have created hundreds of these, very much intentionally.

It's useful for listing the main artist pages outside of the sample image URL list. And it should not be discouraged.

葉月 said:
We had a thread for it already. I'm not sure why it died.

I tried finding this thread, in vain. Previous forum maybe?
Anyway I second the artist romanization request sticky.

I came across an artist with a pixiv identifier ("delant") nice enough to be used as an artist tag here, but the artist also has a completely different kanji nickname (八弦殿), which might suit better depending on how it translates.
Of course I could just go with the pixiv id and disregard the nickname, but since it seems it might be valuable, I thought it was worth asking.

Cyberia-Mix said:
I came across an artist with a pixiv identifier ("delant") nice enough to be used as an artist tag here, but the artist also has a completely different kanji nickname (八弦殿), which might suit better depending on how it translates.
Of course I could just go with the pixiv id and disregard the nickname, but since it seems it might be valuable, I thought it was worth asking.

Google searching turns up this blog belonging to 黑色八弦殿, and that could be the same person. Seems that he's Chinese (would fit with 海外 being on the Pixiv profile), though, so it's probably not romanized like a Japanese name would.

Same date of birth on both, good call. I'm not any better with chinese though.

Sticky now in forum #39382. You can ask there.

Going back to the original topic of the thread, I think that the artist request tag should be reserved for pictures where some source or link or description is given of where the picture came from.

Without anything to go on, it's pretty pointless to tag things with artist request. Someone who comes across the image and happens to know the artist shouldn't be concerned with if the image is tagged artist request.

Instead, I think artist request should be a tag that someone with knowledge of japanese (or some spare time to kill) can search and help answer based on the information provided.

Yeah, the absense of an artist tag implicitly requests that someone add one, so using artist_request for that is rather redundant, and it would serve almost the exact same purpose as source_request.

Conversely, to actually find images with no artist tag, you'd search for arttags:0 instead anyway.

So I agree, artist_request should be used when the artist is known in principle (from pixiv account, site URL, etc.), but the appropriate tag to use is not obvious. As such it might make sense to automatically add it to source:http://img*.pixiv.net/ arttags:0 posts.

[edit] That pixiv arttags:0 search is broken even though the syntax is right (parser's getting confused), but you know what I mean.

We have a thread -- stickied, I might add -- designed to help with creating artist tags, with a sizable community of translators willing to help.

If you are uploading images from a Pixiv account or a blog, you have no excuse.

So then what's the purpose of the artist request tag?

Back then we didn't have the metatags we enjoy so much today, so we had to create a tag substitute to mimic them (solo for chartags:1, source_request for copytags:0, artist_request for arttags:0, etc.).

While solo is still useful for no-name, original characters, artist_request and source_request are probably rendered obsolete now that we have the metatags.

I think artist_request and source_request are still useful for images found off image boards and blogs you know aren't run by the artist. It indicates an explicit acknowledgment by the uploader that the artist/source was not available at the time of upload (not simply un-intelligible or omitted as it might be with Pixiv). It also serves as a reminder for anyone who later sees the image that might know the original source to tag it as such.

Users should strive to find artists and sources for all images that don't have any, not just those where it is spelled out by a tag.

Plus the only times I can imagine someone actually finding the artist or source for an image without any source is when they try to upload the same image and use find similar (which has happened to me a few times). The tags aren't really useful anymore in my opinion, as Moose has suggested.

I don't know that that's true. Artists often have a distinctive style, and a fan of that artist can identify the style whereas the uploader may not have been familiar with them.

CaptainCappy said: Plus the only times I can imagine someone actually finding the artist or source for an image without any source is when they try to upload the same image and use find similar (which has happened to me a few times).

It's not uncommon for, say, work by commercial artists. Artbook scans or game CG and the like aren't going to come from an official website with a URL most of the time, but it's not far-fetched to believe that someone else might recognize the artist. Especially if it's like itou_noiji or goto_p or someone else very famous and distinctive.

Well not that I have much of an opinion on the_request tags. Just saying.

The SauceNOA firefox add-on finds pixiv artists for pictures.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/93451

Its useless 30% of the time but the other 70% it gives you the link to the pixiv artist along with the ID number and picture page.

It can be really helpful for finding pixiv artists for pics not on the site.

CaptainCappy said:

[T]he only times I can imagine someone actually finding the artist or source for an image without any source is when they try to upload the same image and use find similar (...).

It was not terribly long ago that I barely knew Danbooru existed and had no idea about IQDB-type image search engines. I mean, I did not even know that today's computing was advanced enough to program anything like IQDB.

Today I live in hopes that more search sites like TinEye will be created and developed further. Eventually, that should give us chances to identify a very high percentage of those images that lack appropriate tags on such boards as Moe.imouto.