A little something I suggested a while back on the wiki. The forum's a better place for discussing it and hacking it around though. Your thoughts?

"Be verifiable", a suggestion

Or, going beyond the limiting confines of tag what you see - because sometimes you don't, or can't. To be read in conjunction with it.

> tl;dr: you should provide supporting evidence when you tag what you can't see, or be sure the fact is well known

Tags should be verifiable, so that there are fewer disagreements amongst taggers. In general, the best way to do that is to tag what you see. But you can't do that for every image. Sometimes a portion of the image is obscured for artistic purposes either by the layout of the piece or because it has been censored by the artist. For example, it is impossible by definition to tell from all posts tagged bust whether the character is a female or a herm (if they have breasts) just by looking at the image. Species is often not easy to determine beyond a general feline or canine classification, but sometimes is important nonetheless.

This means that if you were to apply the "tag what you see" rule religiously and dogmatically, you would miss some of the meaning. Therefore, be as verifiable as you can when you tag in these cases. There are a few rules of thumb you can apply:
Handling ambiguity

• Always include a source link so that other users can go and verify facts that are not overtly stated.
• Provide supporting evidence: uploading a model sheet for a character is one way.
• If the character or object is well known, you can tag its sex or species or general type in even if that's not stated explicitly in the image.
• If the picture is obviously sexual, but all the intimate details are hidden, you can still tag what's happening.
• If it's still an ambiguous situation, and especially if it's a deliberately ambiguous situation, you can and should tag both sides of the blurred line.

I suppose flaw number one is the title. "Prove you exist, buster! Are you who you claim to be?"

But "strive to make the statements you make about a work you express in its tagging or commentary as verifiable as possible to other site users when they're not obvious just from looking" is a bit of a mouthful. Suggestions for pithier, more crisply precise titles are welcome!

Anomynous said:
I suppose flaw number one is the title. "Prove you exist, buster! Are you who you claim to be?"

But "strive to make the statements you make about a work you express in its tagging or commentary as verifiable as possible to other site users when they're not obvious just from looking" is a bit of a mouthful. Suggestions for pithier, more crisply precise titles are welcome!

This would counter teh common RULE, tag what you see, not what you know.

Princess_Celestia said:
This would counter teh common RULE, tag what you see, not what you know.

I believe tag what you know should always be the main rule, but the addtional "what you know" may be added only if a source link to the artist page is included.

Of course the "what you know" rule should never override the omission of "what you see" tags.

That may occastionally mean you may have conflicting tagging, but there is nothing wrong with having too many tags.

Pardon my apparent trolling here, but I think this will sum it up pretty well..

post #143263

This is thirteenpaws, she may LOOK like a wolf, but she's really a magical fairy dragon angel trapped in the mortal earthy realm in the body of a cat that looks like a wolf.

So she should be tagged with cat fairy dragon and angel. and not wolf.

I would say that tagging what you know should only apply to gaps in what is shown in the image, and not override the actual content. So, for example, a safe image with a known herm (either a herm character or a herm species) might reasonably be tagged with herm, even if the image isn't showing it. However, an explicit image with a known herm character who is drawn as a female should be tagged female, not herm. In other words, if a character is well known enough (or has model sheets/some other form of reference to refer to), it should be assumed that things not shown are consistent with the canonical character.

This shouldn't apply to orientation tags, since we don't use them to denote a character's orientation, and there's probably some others to worry about, but that's my initial thoughts.

This isn't a bad idea. I feel it's especially relevant on comics. For example, the Horse with No Name comic depicts some really rough stuff that under our recently accepted usage of "bondage" and "BDSM" tags should not have those. However, if you read to the end, it was consensual the whole time, and so it is acceptable to tag BDSM the whole way through.

Basically if there's an image that could go to either one side or another on a pair of tags (cuntboy/flatchested, rape/consensual, etc.), but it clearly is one at a later page in the comic, I feel it's acceptable to go back and tag what you know on the earlier image.

The main difficulty is in the gender-bent images. That is, pictures of a well-known character as a different sex than normally portrayed. If, for example, I suddenly gained the ability to draw and got permission to draw Artica Sparkle as a female, I could draw her in a million positions where you couldn't tell if she was hiding her dick or just didn't have one.

I say tag what you know if something is unclear, but you can find evidence for it in the artist's page, a ref sheet, or other images in a series of images. If, however, it seems really obvious that what's depicted contradicts what is "known," then Tag What You See takes precedence over Tag What You Know.

Edit: Sorry if I spoiled anything in that comic, apparently the inline "spoiler" syntax is non-functional.

As i wrote in a different thread, tagging "what you know" can lead to the following :
- some people might not find what they want
- some people might find what they don't want
- as a result of the above, blacklisting wouldn't work properly

This is extremly true for gender ; as it is defined by certain attributes, the gender is determined by what is shown by the picture, and solely by this.
Roughly, when i look for "herm", i want to see a chick with a dick, not a female with her back turned in a way such as there COULD be a penis hidden behind...

It's not a matter of "proving" what you tag by references (wether they are within e621 or not), but of tagging pics accurately ; and even if 100% of the people visiting the site knew that Artica Sparkle is an herm, it wouldn't matter.