The word "dialogue" means "a conversation between two or more characters". And yet, the tag dialogue is used for "text which is being spoken aloud.".

I feel this is wrong because that's not what the word "dialogue" means and it should be fixed because it's causing confusion. There should be a different tag for "text which is being spoken aloud".

What do users want to see?
They want to see characters saying something.

When characters are saying something it either appears in speech_bubbles or as a text next to the characters. A tag that would represent both speech_bubbles and text next to characters.. can be called speech. And it's what dialogue currently represents. So I think we should use speech or speaking instead of dialogue when characters are saying something. The hierarchy should look like this:
dialogue (a type of speech) => speech (a type of text) => text (any symbols)

Things to do:
unalias dialogue and speech
unalias dialogue and speaking
unalias dialogue and monologue
unalias dialogue and talking
alias speech and speaking
alias speech and talking
dialogue implies speech
monologue implies speech
speech_bubble implies speech
talking_to_viewer implies speech
dirty_talk implies speech
talking_penis implies speech
thought_bubble implies thoughts
speech implies text
thoughts implies text
sound_effects implies text

Also need to somehow separate text speech and actual sound speech in flash animations or videos.

Delian said:
The word "dialogue" means "a conversation between two or more characters". And yet, the tag dialogue is used for "text which is being spoken aloud.".

I feel this is wrong because that's not what the word "dialogue" means and it should be fixed because it's causing confusion. There should be a different tag for "text which is being spoken aloud".

What do users want to see?
They want to see characters saying something.

It's not always beneficial for us to be 100% true to the dictionary/standard usage. The dictionary, quite frankly, isn't well-geared to catalogue furry porn. We've run into several cases where dictionary definitions actually work against us, or there isn't really a word for what we want, or there are conflicting definitions. We try to optimize it as best we can to match general usage (and reduce confusion) but that isn't always possible and compromises are generally made on a case-by-case basis.

That being said, I see where you're going with this and I think you have some valid points. I'd like to make a few suggestions based on your proposal.

When characters are saying something it either appears in speech_bubbles or as a text next to the characters. A tag that would represent both speech_bubbles and text next to characters.. can be called speech. And it's what dialogue currently represents. So I think we should use speech or speaking instead of dialogue when characters are saying something. The hierarchy should look like this:
dialogue (a type of speech) => speech (a type of text) => text (any symbols)

I do actually think that using a tag like speech instead of dialogue would be beneficial, however there's nothing to suggest that the English word "speech" is limited to just text. Definition-wise I think that limiting the word "speech" here to just text isn't much better than using "dialogue" to refer to a single person talking. If we didn't allow animations here, implying text might work to some degree.

Also need to somehow separate text speech and actual sound speech in flash animations or videos.

For tagging purposes, I don't see much of a reason to separate "text speech" and "sound speech", since speech -animation, speech sound, or animation speech_bubbles might work just as well provided everything is tagged correctly. It would be nice if we could separate definitions to imply text, but I don't think it's worth the added complexity it would need.

Things to do:
unalias dialogue and speech
unalias dialogue and speaking
unalias dialogue and monologue
unalias dialogue and talking
alias speech and speaking
alias speech and talking
dialogue implies speech
monologue imples speech

I don't see much of a reason to use dialogue/monologue to organize things, particularly when adding them would require a considerable amount of effort to retag. If we were starting off fresh with a new booru I might think differently, but to be perfectly honest I don't think that the amount of work required is worth the tagging effort.

I agree with changing dialogue to speech though.

talking_to_viewer imples speech
dirty_talk imples speech
talking_penis imples speech

Agreed on all 3.

thoughts imples text
thought_bubble imples thoughts
speech implies text
speech_bubble imples speech

• -1, You can have thoughts with symbols or drawings instead of text.
• Unsure, you can technically have empty thought bubbles, but I'm not sure if that's really relevant to us.
• -1, You can have speech in animations.
• -1, You can have empty speech bubbles, or a speech bubble like these: post #451010 post #418073 post #468536 post #517829 http://i.imgur.com/PcIpne2.png

sound_effects implies text

Sound_effects is partially used for the sound effects in animations (moaning, "fist in a mayo jar" squishing sounds, etc.) so as of right now that wouldn't exactly work. Furthermore I don't know that tagging sound_effects with text actually benefits us a whole lot.

It's definitely something worth considering though.

Well. That covered just about everything that I was going to say.
^{There's a talking_penis tag? Why am I not surprised..}

Anyway, I'm on board with the idea of renaming dialogue to speech.

If there's any need for monologue type of tag (and I'm not sure if there is), how about talking_to_self? Implicated to speech. It's consistent with the other tags, and since there's users from all around the world, 'monologue' might be too obscure name for a tag.

I tag dialogue on any image showing a conversation, and *_text on any image showing text, except signatures.

dialogue to speech sounds good

It's not always beneficial for us to be 100% true to the dictionary/standard usage. The dictionary, quite frankly, isn't well-geared to catalogue furry porn. We've run into several cases where dictionary definitions actually work against us, or there isn't really a word for what we want, or there are conflicting definitions. We try to optimize it as best we can to match general usage (and reduce confusion) but that isn't always possible and compromises are generally made on a case-by-case basis.

Indeed, sometimes there are simply no alternatives or no words exist for the term that the users want to see. In this case however, the exact term does exist.

I do actually think that using a tag like speech instead of dialogue would be beneficial, however there's nothing to suggest that the English word "speech" is limited to just text. Definition-wise I think that limiting the word "speech" here to just text isn't much better than using "dialogue" to refer to a single person talking. If we didn't allow animations here, implying text might work to some degree.

Well, leaving dialogue as it is would be the worst of the solutions in my opinion.

For tagging purposes, I don't see much of a reason to separate "text speech" and "sound speech", since speech -animation, speech sound, or animation speech_bubbles might work just as well provided everything is tagged correctly. It would be nice if we could separate definitions to imply text, but I don't think it's worth the added complexity it would need.

So we have speech_in_text and speech_in_sound. Considering the vast majority of users who're searching for "character saying something" are searching for the text version, I think it would be reasonable and beneficial to users to alias speech with speech_in_text, and give them the alternative possibility of speech_in_sound if they really want to find that. This wouldn't create any additional complexity because you wouldn't need an umbrella speech tag to encompass both speech_in_text and speech_in_sound.

I don't see much of a reason to use dialogue/monologue to organize things, particularly when adding them would require a considerable amount of effort to retag. If we were starting off fresh with a new booru I might think differently, but to be perfectly honest I don't think that the amount of work required is worth the tagging effort.

I agree. Since dialogue is currently an alias to monologue, there's no separation between the two. It means that, as it is, these two tags don't exist in their meaning. Since these two tags don't exit, we need to ask ourselves if users actually need both of them. And the answer is, no. Because no one is searching for monologue. This is why tagging all the images with speech to have dialogue and/or monologue would be just a waste of time.

(thoughts implies text ) * -1, You can have thoughts with symbols or drawings instead of text.

True. But I think those are exceptions where the artist is using images as representations of words. Also, the definition of text says "writing or typography". Since "symbols or drawings" are a type of typography, you could still imply text, if I'm not mistaken.

(thought_bubble imples thoughts) Unsure, you can technically have empty thought bubbles, but I'm not sure if that's really relevant to us.

I think those cases should be tagged with empty_text_bubble then.

(speech implies text)-1, You can have speech in animations.

As written above, speech should default to speech_in_text

(speech_bubble imples speech) -1, You can have empty speech bubbles, or a speech bubble like these: post #451010 post #418073 post #468536 post #517829 http://i.imgur.com/PcIpne2.png[/quote]Yes, those are nice examples. But that's a misuse of speech bubbles. Speech bubbles were designed to contain speech. Putting anything else inside revokes their meaning, thus, speech bubbles with anything besides speech in them aren't speech bubbles anymore. misused_text_bubble / expression_bubble ?

Sound_effects is partially used for the sound effects in animations (moaning, "fist in a mayo jar" squishing sounds, etc.) so as of right now that wouldn't exactly work. Furthermore I don't know that tagging sound_effects with text actually benefits us a whole lot.

The definition of sound_effects says "On e621, the tag is mainly used for written sound effects in pictures". In my opinion, it's the same case as the speech. The default should go to the text version while there can be an alternative for the sound version. Or not. Actually I don't care about this one. Do users actually search for "sound effects in animations"?

So we have speech_in_text and speech_in_sound. Considering the vast majority of users who're searching for "character saying something" are searching for the text version, I think it would be reasonable and beneficial to users to alias speech with speech_in_text, and give them the alternative possibility of speech_in_sound if they really want to find that. This wouldn't create any additional complexity because you wouldn't need an umbrella speech tag to encompass both speech_in_text and speech_in_sound.

speech_in_text and speech_in_sound sound wordy. If anything, creating an audio_dialogue (audio_speech? voice_acting?) tag and implicating it to speech would be better. I don't know if we need such a tag though...

(Suggestions about misused_text_bubble, expression_bubble, empty_text_bubble)

I'd still consider those speech bubbles. There's no need to split up the (perhaps already useless) speech_bubble tag--especially since we can use speech_bubble -speech and pictographics.

(thoughts implies text)

thoughts and speech could be pictographics; it seems counter-intuitive to call those text. At any rate, I consider text to be another useless tag that there's no need to mess with.

(thought_bubble implies thoughts)

The thoughts tag is not currently in use. The thoughts and thought_bubble tags would be virtually identical, making the thoughts tag redundant.