I haven't checked, but I assume that there is a small group of dedicated nerds somewhere, habitually tagging the names of aircraft and other military miscellany simply to silence the screaming of the historical knowledge festering within, haunting every moment it goes unused.

post #1162631
For example, I don't see how knowing that the post above contains a UH-60 Black Hawk could help me find similar posts. Nor could I identify it in a low-res version linked on Reddit, for example, and then search for uh-60_blackhawk to find the post and thus the source — I can barely identify it as-is.
(That post has a few other examples as well.)

The most-used tag I found (though I didn't look very hard) was ak-47 with 127 posts, which is less than 1% of ranged_weapon. Most times I see these sorts of tags, they're only on the one post. So what is the purpose of them? Is being in 20 posts enough to warrant keeping such a specific tag?

Necro edit: and phones

Tag what you see rule - ridiculously pushed to the borders ^^ To be honest, I think such tagging is redundant but since tagging such things hurts nobody it doesn't matter at all

There is no downside to having a tag for each and every weapon.

AoBird said:
There is no downside to having a tag for each and every weapon.

there is. its extremely difficult to maintain and standardize large amounts of weapon tags. there is almost certainly multiple tags for exact same weapons, but it extremely difficult to catch this sort of issues with the sheer amount of these tags

AoBird said:
There is no downside to having a tag for each and every weapon.

words spoken by someone who doesn't realize the kettle of fish that is.

There are literally 80 variations of the Huey Helicopter alone.

If users could set up aliases and implications, maybe it wouldn't be a problem, as you could set up all of the UH-1B's and AH-1Z's and YAH-1S's to imply the appropriate types of things... But then we'd have a very different mess.

not to mention, some artists just search for "helicopter" and leave it at that.

To drop it into better furry terms:

We tag "fox" right now.

You are proposing that we tag subspecies of red fox (one of about 12(give or take 25) species of foxes) -- y'know: the British Columbian fox and the Eastern trans-Caucasian fox, the Anadyr fox, European fox, the Kodiak fox, the hill fox....

post #1590611

Would you say this is a Sakhalin fox? a Northern plains fox? a High Sierra fox? Are we 'racist' and assume it's a European fox or North American fox?

No. Because it's a fox. It's probably a red fox, because most members of the vulpes family are grayish or look very different, while non-vulpes foxes are also gray and different looking. But we cna't get any further than red fox.

Unless she's meant to be a island fox with red fur. Whoops.

SnowWolf said:
There are literally 80 variations of the Huey Helicopter alone.

Well that's just a straw-man argument. Family is what's tagged, like UH-1 for all Hueys. Or AR-15 for anything vaguely resembling Stoner's rifle. That's about the level of detail most artist would maintain anyway.

AK-47 for instance works well as a tag for a distinct, recognizable family of rifles. But it's almost never correct, unless the setting is a military museum or something. AK-47 is nominally a very particular model that was produced for just a few years (starting from 1947) and then redesigned and the redesigned ones all had different designations.

For me (a random user searching for things), the best trade-off would be based on this:
Are the results something I can sort through in a reasonable amount of time?

For example minigun has less than two pages of results, tagging the specific models aren't necessary for now. _{why are there so many fucking ponies in this jesus}

tank has five and a half pages and should probably start getting broken down into its sub-types when possible. That's more than I'd want to sort through if I knew the name of a particular tank,

hslugs said:
Well that's just a straw-man argument. Family is what's tagged, like UH-1 for all Hueys. Or AR-15 for anything vaguely resembling Stoner's rifle. That's about the level of detail most artist would maintain anyway.

AK-47 for instance works well as a tag for a distinct, recognizable family of rifles. But it's almost never correct, unless the setting is a military museum or something. AK-47 is nominally a very particular model that was produced for just a few years (starting from 1947) and then redesigned and the redesigned ones all had different designations.

... The post I was replying to said "There is no downside to having a tag for each and every weapon." ... each and every weapon... would (presumably) mean each and every helicopter.

Let me state my opinion clearly: We don't need tags for each and every helicopter or weapon. That is ridiculous, and overly specific. If you try to be overly specific, it's bad. We do not need tags for the eastern_trans-caucasian_fox anymore than we need tags for the UH-1L, the TH-1A, or the HH-1D.

The differences between helicopters--much like subspecies of red fox--can be very subtle and hard to recognize for the non-expert.

Most artists are going to google image search "attack helicopter" or "news helicopter" and use what they find as a reference, rather than doing extensive research on what type of helicopter is, for example, likely to be in use in a fire-rescue operation in southern France in the mid 90's.

They are not going to know the difference between a Mil mi-8, a Sikorsky S-64 or a Bell 205.

Neither are most people tagging.

Then there's the fact that some people are going just draw whatever they think a helicopter looks like, or make up their own helicopter.

We should keep this simple: attack_helicopter, assault_rifle, etc.

If people want to be more specific, then put the information in the description!

but that's my opinion, anyway.

I didn't say for each and every serial number of weapon.

And if someone wants to search for British Columbian fox or Bell 205, let them.

Fox is a tag, British Columbian fox is a (sub)tag.
Helicopter is a tag, Bell 205 is a (sub)tag.
The latter not being required and there is no reason for maintaining it.
Someone getting some results is better than none.

It depends of the Uploader's judgment of the tag worthiness, and the Searcher's ability to break down it's query.

If they can be tagged accurately (and with no danger of tag wars), I suppose there's not much harm in tagging them. But it does seem pointless, and I'm not quite sure that guns and vehicles can be tagged consistently. The various melee weapon tags have shown that those tend to get messy.

From what I remember, the old policy is along the lines: "Do not tag specific models. Those are not the focus of the site, and we don't even go into that much detail for most site-relevant things". Which has worked fine.

Genjar said:
danger of tag wars

post #815497 Exactly what you're gonna get when the source of something like this insists the rifle is a Lee-Enfield No.4

I'm in favour of keeping the tags simpler.