I think ermine should be aliased to weasel, but when I try to submit that suggestion, I get an error that says "ermine is already aliased to something". That isn't true. It is true that stoat is aliased to ermine (not the other way around), but I don't see why that should invalidate the suggestion, since any reasoning for aliasing ermine to weasel would also support aliasing stoat to weasel.

Is there any way around the error?

For the record, this was my reasoning:

When used without qualifiers, "weasel" technically refers to either the least weasel or its entire genus, including ermines/stoats, ferrets, minks, polecats, etc. The intended meaning of the weasel tag must be the former, since the other species have there own tags, of which it isn't an implication, while the least weasel doesn't have its own tag.

However, the only qualitative difference between an ermine and a least weasel is that the latter has a black tip on its tail. The tags do not seem to have been used with this distinction in mind, and I don't think it would be worth making if they had, so I propose just calling both species weasels (the more familiar term) for the purposes of this site.

Different species are different species.

How would you like it if you had a mouse character and someone said we should tag it as a rat because the only qualitative difference is the size.

Hammie said:
Different species are different species.

People haven't been treating them that way so far; the tags seem to have been used interchangeably, with many ermine characters tagged as weasels and a few least weasels tagged as ermines. I could go through all the old posts and change the tags to enforce the distinction, but if people haven't cared in the past, I don't think they're going to start now.

How would you like it if you had a mouse character and someone said we should tag it as a rat because the only qualitative difference is the size.

Size is a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. In fact there is no qualitative difference between rats and mice in general, which is why I've considered suggesting that they be aliased as well. I think that's a discussion for another time, though.

Actually size can be either depending on situation and specificity of the sizes being discussed.

Hammie said:
Actually size can be either depending on situation and specificity of the sizes being discussed.

How so?

Also, I should have pointed out before that "mouse" and "rat" aren't species, but rather groups of species. A more fitting comparison would be between weasels/ermines and, say, black rats/brown rats, which, notably, don't have their own tags.

Just a reminder that Stoat is still incorrectly aliased to Ermine.

It should be the other way around.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoat

Ermine is an archaic name for the Stoat - we used to stupidly think that a Stoat in his winter coat was a separate type of weasel called the Ermine. We were wrooooong.

P.S. Bumped this instead of creating more stoat threads.