The harem_outfit tag currently has as its wiki page "Use Harem instead." If this is valid advice, it should be an alias. If this is not valid advice, the wiki needs updated. What's going on here?

Both wikis were updated 3 and 6 years ago.

• Harem_outfit: Characters wearing an outfit you'd expect from concubines living in a harem.
• Harem: [snip] This is for the actual location.

So it was definitely an effort to consolidate them. Personally I don't see the need to define this tag beyond the outfit as it has several similar meanings (most of which are either useless for tagging or generally derogatory) but we should probably define it with more than "slutty and vaguely Middle-Eastern outfit".

I'm not sure exactly of the best approach, but I think I may have to do some research first and see if we have similar tags that might overlap or be confused with this (I dunno gypsy?). Either way, I'll let you know what I come up with before updating the wiki.

Both harem and harem_outfit tend to overlap with belly_dancer.
I'm not sure what to do about those. Tagging belly_dancer_outfit might be slightly less ambiguous..

^{By the way, the costume is called bedlah, but that's almost certainly too obscure name for the tag.}

We should use bedlah if that's the name for it

harem/harem_harem outfit for the clothing does nothing to prevent more ignorance from spreading

Maybe an alias harem_outfit, belly*dancer_outfit -> bedlah

So...There's 2 meanings we've got to deal with here:

• A bunch of (females) around a single (male) in a sort of "I'm a sex slave" sort of way. Somewhat vague and subjective, but the majority of posts seem to make the point well enough.
• The outfit itself, which is called a bedleh.

While harem_outfit is tagged consistently, I don't think it is really the best name for it. It would be better if we could give it a name to separate it from harem regardless of what we call it. I think even belly_dancer_outfit is better than harem_outfit if I had a choice. I don't know how well-known bedlah is (I've always just sort of referred to it as "belly dancer outfit"), but it at least seems like a better option for us than harem_outfit. I don't think there would be much wrong with aliasing a few things to it, but harem probably needs to be sorted out at the very least (harem -male should pick most of it up).

If we can throw together a rough plan, the wiki entries should be no problem to write.

We use omorashi to refer to a desperate need to pee. I think we can use bedlah to refer to a harem outfit. It's the sort of thing where someone clicks on it and goes, "Hey, cool, so that's what this is called." I like that there's an actual term.

As a result of making this thread and then searching for the term 'bedlah', I discovered that the bedlah was invented in Britain. It showed up in other cultures only later, by people who liked it and carried the idea elsewhere.

Let's alias harem_outfit -> bedlah and then sort out the harem tag.

Added: Having done that little bit of research, I find myself wondering if we should invoke the hard and soft differentiation on bedlah gear in our tagging. Hard bedlah is the jewelry. Soft bedlah is the soft translucent clothing. Bedlah outfits can be either or both. I'd encourage this to be used, except I'm hazy on how much fabric has to be present to constitute soft bedlah.

I think some will not notice bedlah when they would have noticed and clicked on harem_outfit.

But learning this word is very educational.

Really wish people wouldn't try to use tags for education, though. That's what the wiki is for. The purpose of tags is to be easily searchable/intuitive.

I actually like harem_outfit much better than belly_dancer_outfit. The dragoness in post #601991 does not look like a belly dancer, but I saw her and immediately thought, "Hey! It's that stereotypical harem gear, I've seen that before."

So should I use harem_outfit or harem?

The wiki(harem_outfit) says to use harem instead.