An intestering topic of debate was brought up to me, through a PM I received from lemongrab, in regards to tagging characters of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic as ponies, and therefore horses as a result of tag implication.

According to the pony wiki, "They should not be confused with other equine species as defined by the e621 Wiki. Ponies are differentiated from unicorns by the lack of a horn and from pegasi by the lack of wings." And while that may be true for anything excluding MLP, everything including MLP differs from this.

My Little Pony. In the show, every variation of equine is referred to as a pony. Doesn't matter if it has horns (unicorns) or wings (pegasi) or both (winged unicorns or "Alicorns"), they are ponies, in the same way that humans of different nationalities are still referred to as humans.

I don't care who's right or wrong. I just want decisive answers and an invigorating debate to clear my head of this troubling conundrum.

Ahh the long standing pony issue. I'll give a TLDR on how we have it set up right now, and explain a bit more later:

• earth_pony - Tagged for earth ponies, but more frequently tagged with just pony.
• unicorn/pegasus - Don't tag with pony or horse
• winged_unicorn - Don't tag with pony, horse, or unicorn (or pegasus, but that's less of an issue)

Unicorns can be styled as more horse-like or more goat-like depending on mythology, so it was decided early on that it was better off implying them to the more broad equine to prevent mistagging. I believe this was even before MLP was a significant demographic here, but I could be wrong.

"Winged Unicorn"/alicorn have the same reasoning as unicorns, but probably less so. "Winged_unicorn" was probably chosen over "alicorn" due to it being more non-standard at the time than even now, and I suspect partially as a way of disassociating with the MLP fandom. There's an interesting read on it here if you enjoy etymology.

Pegasus literally wouldn't be a species tag if it weren't for MLP. Pegasus (as a concept) would probably imply horse if it weren't for the other mythological equines as that's pretty much what it is, however the trouble of keeping pony from being tagged on unicorns is probably not worth the effort.

Pony and earth_pony pretty much refer to the same thing here except that pony has meaning outside of MLP. I don't really see the value of keeping all of pony/earth_pony/horse, but out of all these pony probably causes the most mistagging (as we currently have it set up).

I was trying to point out that you didn't need to add the "horse" and "pony" tags to posts where only winged unicorns are visible.

Such as these:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

According to the wiki for winged_unicorn --> "A winged unicorn should not be tagged with horse, unicorn, pegasus, or pony."

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forum #118116

lemongrab said:
forum #118116

Back when the forum was full of brute, head-on discussion. Good times, good times.

TheHuskyK9 said:
Back when the forum was full of brute, head-on discussion. Good times, good times.

Now it's just robot overlord parasprite.

Lance_Armstrong said:
Now it's just robot overlord parasprite.

parasprite said:
Pony and earth_pony pretty much refer to the same thing here except that pony has meaning outside of MLP. I don't really see the value of keeping all of pony/earth_pony/horse, but out of all these pony probably causes the most mistagging (as we currently have it set up).

lemongrab said:
I was trying to point out that you didn't need to add the "horse" and "pony" tags to posts where only winged unicorns are visible.

So, based on what I'm reading here, just leaving it as equine and the one defining species is enough? For example, if I were to upload a post with the Twilight Sparkle character, and she has both a horn and wings, just Winged_Unicorn would suffice, which in turn would imply equine?

GameManiac said:
So, based on what I'm reading here, just leaving it as equine and the one defining species is enough? For example, if I were to upload a post with the Twilight Sparkle character, and she has both a horn and wings, just Winged_Unicorn would suffice, which in turn would imply equine?

Yee

TheHuskyK9 said:
Yee

Ok. My questions have been answered.