Aliasing non-anthro -> feral.

Reason: Non-anthro has 510 images.
Feral has 8271.

Both refer to a 'natural' animal form. Having both is redundant and confusing.

There was a bit of discussion about this topic about a year ago now, it should also be read. forum #1583

*read* Oooh... this thread was started by the dude who made the wiki page that I'm in the middle of rewriting...

his examples still don't make sense.

wait.. waitwaitwait.

I GET IT!!!! *hops up and down*

Non-anthro is supposed to be anything that isn't an anthro. IE, weird aliens who are in their 'canon' shape (Anthro post #119252, non-anthro: post #127136), an image that contains no anthro characters (like this CHART post #47568, or these random papercraft instructions: post #48072), a human, or cat-person...

So it's like a weird crushing of not_furry, feral and 'other', that's supposed to cover the rare case where not_furry, feral or animal_ears doesn't apply.

I'm sorry if this was clear to everyone else but I swear a lightbulb just turned on over my head.

This is a HORRIBLE idea. Non-anthro, by general rule of furry thumb, refers to the characters we tag with FERAL. Natural animal forms. and to make it worse, the wiki page described this idea in a TERRIBLE manner that made it seem like nonanthro and feral covered the same territory.

Geeze. Okay. Let me think.

... okay. I STILL think the non-anthro tag should go away. it's redundant, it's mostly pointless, and, worst of all, and the biggest reason yet: It's CONFUSING.

But, now, it can't just be an easy application of the alias...

If we go through with this, I guess I'll have to go through the 500 or so non-anthro pictures and add not_furry and remove non-anthro from several of them, so the ones remaining would be properly hit by the alias, if it was made to happen.

Thoughts?

The problem is : both "non-anthro" and "feral" can be understood differently.

While non-anthro often connotates an intelligent behaviour in animal looking characters (ex : The Lion King), on a strict semantic point of view, "non-anthro" would define that which has no human feature (neither aspect nor behaviour).

Same goes for feral : while some people would understand it as "pure animal", some would use it to describe a strictly animal looking character, regardless of behaviour and mental features.

Kald said:
While non-anthro often connotates an intelligent behaviour in animal looking characters (ex : The Lion King), on a strict semantic point of view, "non-anthro" would define that which has no human feature (neither aspect nor behaviour).

Same goes for feral : while some people would understand it as "pure animal", some would use it to describe a strictly animal looking character, regardless of behaviour and mental features.

Yes. Exactly. but there's not really any way to TELL just by looking at a picture what the mindset or intelligence of a creature is. Especially if it's in the middle of a sexual act.

the problem is that the way non-anthro is currently being defined by the site is NOT what you just described. Non-anthro is being used as a tag like not_furry Not_anthro would be the 'better' phrase for it.

It's like there's a weird set of rules for a picture:

is it furry? if yes, tag nothing; if no:
is it feral? if yes, tag feral; if no:
is it an 'animal ears' person? if yes, tag animal_ears; if no:
is it human? if yes, tag human, not_furry; if no:
is it an elf, demon, orc or similar? if yes; tag not_furry, if no:
is it a robot? if yes, tag not_furry; if no:
is it an alien appearing as it did in it's original canon material? if yes, tag non-anthro; if no:
is it something else entirely like a flow chart, or some papercraft directions? If yes, tag non_anthro; if no:
God only knows what it is. it should probably be tagged non_anthro.

and, make matters worse: non-anthro is being used to describe feral characters. the entire first page of results for non-anthro are feral characters... and most of them are also tagged feral.

The page for non_anthro actually says "It is unnecessary to add the term "non-anthro" if you've already used one of these tags: Feral, Human, animal_ears"...

basically saying... we're doing it wrong. and something, somewhere needs to change. Considering that even if the 'directions' were changed, this would be a place where mistakes would continue to be made, I'm proposing getting rid of the possibility for error, and making it so that our screw up is doing it right.

Alternatively: If an alien apears in an anthro context (different from original), we can tag it anthro. If it appears in a feral context (different from original), we can tag it feral. That leaves all three contexts covered. (since the original can be assumed to be the original if no other altering tags are included) Hence there're no situation where non-anthro is used, where not-furry is not also used.

I hate this discussion.

So do I, but I hate that non-anthro is so terribly... wrong even more D:

Okay. different standpoint:

What other word can we use to fill the niche that non-anthro is aimed at filling? Is 'not furry' and 'feral' good enough? Do we need that 'space' filled? and if so, with what word?

my main concern is getting rid of the confusion D:

Okay. Bump.

I went through non-anthro tonight and added feral to a boat load of images. There are about 30 pictures left, and most of those are flash videos I didn't look at because i was lazy :P

I don't really think that 'non-anthro is being used in the way it was initially intended, is horribly ambiguous for the average user, and that the tag is kind of unneeded in general.

I again verbalize my support for aliasing it to feral :)

Yeah, agree.

SnowWolf said:
I again verbalize my support for aliasing it to feral :)

I disagree. I wholeheartedly support doing something to it, it's a p.o.s. tag. But aliasing it to feral is not the way to go. Unfortunately, I don't know where to find my example images now that they've all been retagged XD Ah, here. The only case I can find anymore where non-anthro applies, but feral or some other tag we already have doesn't apply is post #64283. And I personally feel like it should probably be removed, even if it is a well-drawn car by Mot. It seems irrelevant.

Anyway. I would support aliasing "non_anthro" to "invalid_tag," forcing the tagger to consider using feral or not_furry, depending on the image. As you said above, "not_furry" and "feral" are probably good enough, but the tag "non_anthro" seems to be applied to both. Not to mention that technically, non_anthro can be applied to humans, as anthropomorphizing is giving human attributes to non-human things. Granted, we don't tag that way because it's unnecessary, but we could. And humans, unless they actually are feral humans, should definitely not be tagged "feral."

Long story short, alias it to "invalid_tag" instead.

After looking at the current pics that are remaining (but not the flashes) i'd say I agree with Red. Alias it to invalid tag. So much work is either feral or anthro I think we can let the stuff that is neither be untagged by an anthro/non-anthro/feral type tag, mostly because there'll be other tags that one would search for to get to those images instead of the relatively obtuse non-anthro.

RedOctober said:
I would support aliasing "non_anthro" to "invalid_tag," forcing the tagger to consider using feral or not_furry

You're dreaming if you think the average uploader has this kind of philosophical thought, or even double-checks his tags.

Considering the mass editing that just happened, you might as well alias "non_anthro" to "feral".

Kald said:
You're dreaming if you think the average uploader has this kind of philosophical thought, or even double-checks his tags.

Considering the mass editing that just happened, you might as well alias "non_anthro" to "feral".

Hah, I guess. But part of the point of aliasing isn't to just correct current issues, it's to prevent future issues. Mass editing just happened, so there's no longer a real need to alias it to correct that, just to prevent future confusion. I don't think aliasing it to "feral" will do so, I think that'll just provide a lot of non-feral things tagged non-furry. Maybe not.

RedOctober said:
I disagree. I wholeheartedly support doing something to it, it's a p.o.s. tag. But aliasing it to feral is not the way to go. Unfortunately, I don't know where to find my example images now that they've all been retagged XD

Well, every image (all 300-400ish) I retagged were of feral animals XD

The general 'difference" between nonanthro and feral, in general furry definition is... mental state. but there's no way to tell if that's a DOG, or a intelligent creature in most cases via appearance. I mean, you can guess: post #144368 post #133894 but most are a lot more ambiguous: post #108487 post #139892 etc. And for *some* of us, we learned that "non-anthro" or "non-morphic" was the word for animal-form characters.

Really, ALL of them were feral-formed characters. The only ones that were dubious at all were some pokemon pictures (because after the first 150, I have no idea what they're supposed to look like... they didn't look like pokemorphs, so I guessed that they were 'feral'... ) and a few like this post #97382 where it's not fully clear if the creatures are anthro or feral. (In this case, I'm honestly inclined toward removing the feral tag, but not for sure. Pepe and Penelope were pretty comfortable on 2 or 4 paws, though, and people regarded them as animals, so blahblahblah, I dunno)

In any event, I can't make it 'easy', but I think all of the retaggings are on these page: http://e621.net/post_tag_history/index?user_id=11271&page=6 .. scroll down past the +hasbro, but if you get to +bound, you've gone too far :)

Ah, here. The only case I can find anymore where non-anthro applies, but feral or some other tag we already have doesn't apply is post #64283. And I personally feel like it should probably be removed, even if it is a well-drawn car by Mot. It seems irrelevant.

Agreed on all counts. :) that is non-anthro... or is it not_furry? I don't think we NEED a tag for things that are not A B C D E F or G.

likewise post #137398 post #112740 are also not... anything really. I could probably find more examples, but 5 pages of 'what' are enough for me.

Anyway. I would support aliasing "non_anthro" to "invalid_tag," forcing the tagger to consider using feral or not_furry, depending on the image.

think is, 99.5% of people tagging 'non-anthro' meant 'feral'. Aside from the flash the last 'properly' non anthro image was 17 days ago (and should probably be tagged not_furry, actually, as it's a robot), and past that, a YEAR ago. Everything else is older..

Considering how commonly 'nonanthro' is used to describe feral creatures, I think we'd be doing a diservice to make it an invalid tag.

As you said above, "not_furry" and "feral" are probably good enough, but the tag "non_anthro" seems to be applied to both.

Actually, non_anthro, as currently written, is applied to neither. Non-anthro shouldn't be applied to an image that already has animal_ears, human, not_furry, feral or is a furry. Which leaves... charts, and some other 'odd' things I spilled it out in a nice little flow chart above, though now I'd argue that a non-changed alien is a feral critter :P

Not to mention that technically, non_anthro can be applied to humans, as anthropomorphizing is giving human attributes to non-human things. Granted, we don't tag that way because it's unnecessary, but we could. And humans, unless they actually are feral humans, should definitely not be tagged "feral."

This is all very very true -- but anyone who tags a human as feral is gonna get stared at oddly. :) and there are no non-anthro humans tagged, so this isn't really an arguement for nor aliasing non-anthro to feral :)

123easy said:
After looking at the current pics that are remaining (but not the flashes) i'd say I agree with Red. Alias it to invalid tag. So much work is either feral or anthro I think we can let the stuff that is neither be untagged by an anthro/non-anthro/feral type tag, mostly because there'll be other tags that one would search for to get to those images instead of the relatively obtuse non-anthro.

as a side note, I BELIEVE 'anthro' is supposed to be used only when there's a feral or a human in the picture as well, to make it easier to find anthro/human and feral/anthro interactions. I don't like it much, but it's better then having 'anthro' on almost ever single image.

Not that that has much relevance, though it's slightly related to the topic.

However, non-anthro isn't really obtuse at all. If I untagged 400 images with it, and we say that they've ALL been acumulated over the last 4 years (though I suspect it's been a lot shorter... if you look at the history on the wiki entry for non-anthro, you can see that as recently as september 2 2009 the definition refered to "a furry who's nonhuman-human ratio" is "75-100% animal" while "usually retaining human intelligence when talking about fursona characters."

On november 11th 2009, Tauxiera changed it to it's current state. This matches up with the forum thread linked by Riversyde above, where Tauxiera proposed a new definition. (Honestly, looking at some of the tags back then, so much has changed! Apparently, If I read this correctly, at one point the word "animal" implicated 'zoo', which, at the time, was bestiality. Yikes!) And oddly, amusingly, it doesn't at all seem like his idea met with approval. There was considerable discussion about usage of non-anthro in regards to tagging and no one ever really came up with a conclusion, it just kind of... trailed off. I assume he went ahead and changed the wiki of his own accord... looking at his tag edits.. well, he was tagging a while lot in the anthro, feral, non-anthro area... so it's hard to tell exactly what he was doing, I see a LOT of -non_anthro in there... but, it's hard to be sure.

In any event, if the last 4 years have had 400+ "wrong/feral" non-anthro images tagged, that's over 100 in a year, or about one every 3 or 4 days.... however, if Tauxiera actually cleaned out the tag in november as I suspect he did, that's jsut over a year and a half.. that's very roughly 21 in a month.

in either case, that's a LOT of 'mistagged' images. ... suggesting that it's a pretty common point of confusion. :)

Besides, an alias just means that it's easier for people to get what they want, and tag as they think it should be tagged. :)

RedOctober said:
Hah, I guess. But part of the point of aliasing isn't to just correct current issues, it's to prevent future issues. Mass editing just happened, so there's no longer a real need to alias it to correct that, just to prevent future confusion.

with the "stats" mentioned above, I think it's a needed alias, honestly. the reason I retagged manually was because I wasn't sure how many "non-anthro" images there really were... I was honestly expecting to retag, y'know, half of them, not... ALL of them c_c;;;

I don't think aliasing it to "feral" will do so, I think that'll just provide a lot of non-feral things tagged non-furry. Maybe not

I don't think it will, and belive I mention why above in regards to dates... I've already been typing this forever (I keep getting interrupted! Which means I sometimes forget what I was saying, and go on and on..) so I won't belabor the point. :)

Also, I'll totally check those flash and tag the last few images appropriately. Any "mistagging" would purely be the work of future taggers. and I really don't think that will happen c_c;;

grawwwwh. even longer then I thought c_c

SnowWolf said:
grawwwwh. even longer then I thought c_c

Hah. Quite long. But well said. I concede. Alias away.

I was talking about searching the current flashes and charts and such under non-anthro as being obtuse, not the tag in and of itself; That's all.

123easy said:
I was talking about searching the current flashes and charts and such under non-anthro as being obtuse, not the tag in and of itself; That's all.

damn. You totally were. My bad.

"Feral" just means the state of an animal having gone back to wild-like behaviour after having been domesticated. So I tend not to use it because most of the time you can't see that in the image.

non anthro or animal is what I use for very animal-like critters. Contrast semi anthro for very-animally furries, anthro for the middle of the range mutts, then animal ears and human for the shallow end. That's sort of the continuum I use. Documenting...

Perhaps this isn't the best thread to toss this up, but I've noticed we have a anthro tag. With only 4k images.

For an image site mostly hosting anthro artwork (and the most common furry art drawn), isn't this a reduntant tag to have, given that its hardly used also? It should be given that anthro is a just a given, unless stated otherwise as like below.

Non_anthro and feral are fine (or what ever implications/alias are determined) as those images are a small majority of the images shown here.

Murmillos said:
Perhaps this isn't the best thread to toss this up, but I've noticed we have a anthro tag. With only 4k images.

For an image site mostly hosting anthro artwork (and the most common furry art drawn), isn't this a reduntant tag to have, given that its hardly used also? It should be given that anthro is a just a given, unless stated otherwise as like below.

Anthro is used for when there is an anthro furry, as well as a feral furry in the post.
http://e621.net/wiki/show?title=anthro

Riversyde said:
Anthro is used for when there is an anthro furry, as well as a feral furry in the post.
http://e621.net/wiki/show?title=anthro

Ahh, I should have read that. Generally speaking tho, while that may have been the idea behind the tag; in the wild tho it's not how it's working. Single images are often listed as anthro. Meaning a lot of heavy tag cleaning up is required, as both images that the tag should be on isn't, and images the tag is on shouldn't.

Murmillos said:
Ahh, I should have read that. Generally speaking tho, while that may have been the idea behind the tag; in the wild tho it's not how it's working. Single images are often listed as anthro. Meaning a lot of heavy tag cleaning up is required, as both images that the tag should be on isn't, and images the tag is on shouldn't.

Yep. As for the mass of anthro tags on solo furries, I blame kitsu. *adds removing invalid anthro tags to to-do list*

Riversyde said:
Anthro is used for when there is an anthro furry, as well as a feral furry in the post.
http://e621.net/wiki/show?title=anthro

Except for when it's not
post #146537

Oh.

Riversyde said:
Yep. As for the mass of anthro tags on solo furries, I blame kitsu. *adds removing invalid anthro tags to to-do list*

Good call. Maybe have it on the Tagging Projects thread?

A whole mess of words like non morphic and and non-anthro have been aliased to feral :D