While tagging some new uploads, it occurred to me to ask how it should work when a character is plausibly, but not obviously, of a particular species.

post #3215817 post #3217861
Under a TWYK perspective, LuxAlice is a living_plushie. In TWYS, it's vague (text doesn't count), at best being some kind of rabbit (because ears + coloring), carbuncle (because animal features + forehead gem), demon (because horns), a hybrid of the aforementioned, or something else entirely, since the images appear to lack the kind of detailing that would obviously suggest LuxAlice isn't a flesh-and-blood being.

Maybe this particular example is really easy to tag and I'm just overthinking it. Okay, fair, but what about these?
post #3151897 post #3110689
How are these characters kumiho if there's no immediately obvious Korean theming, or consuming of livers? Is kumiho due a cleanup to remove it from images that don't already scream "korean flesh-eating fox"? Do all these posts get a pass because they're not not foxes?
post #3054805 post #1484224
Since characters are effectively TWYK and we know these to be Deathmaster Snikch and a fancharacter, what would need to change for these to be non-skaven rats? Is skaven also in need of a cleanup?
Gnolls vs. more conventional hyaenids? Vulpera vs. more conventional fennec foxes? Yuan-ti vs. the various serpentine/humanoid tags? And all of the other species that imply things like dungeons_and_dragons?

Separately but related: several instances of drider lack any apparent drow features (spider_taur appears to incorrectly list drider as a humanoid equivalent.) All instances of rachnera_arachnera_(monster_musume) being tagged as drider are completely wrong because she's not drow and she's never called a "drider" in-universe, so is arachne appropriate? Should it be spider_humanoid_taur instead?

Tag_what_you_see includes a clause that outside information is irrelevant when tagging species, so technically we have several thousand mistagged posts.

Despite what the tag_what_you_see page says for tagging species, I generally stick to whatever the artist says they are or tags them as. For example by TWYS I would've probably tagged post #2330981 as gnoll, but the artist tags on Weasyl labeled them as a kobold, so they were tagged here as furred_kobold instead. I think to some degree tagging what you know for species is needed, especially considering some species are shared across multiple IPs with inconsistent traits like demons and dragons. And the examples you gave, such as skaven vs generic anthro rat, show the inverse issue where multiple species tags share most, if not all, their defining traits.

As for the drider, going by the wiki definition the tag probably needs cleaned up. Anything that is not half drow should probably be retagged as spider_taur.

I did some casual searching of species→copyright implications and compiled a list of more tags that appear to have issues with TWYS.
changeling_(fey)
cu-sith (this also implies spectral_dog on characters that shouldn't have it, such as the Japanese takes on cu sith.)
girtablilu (vs. scorpion_taur)
harpy (vs. more general avian_humanoids, also this tag in particular is lousy with mistags.)
Breath of the Wild rito in images that otherwise lack LoZ elements.
phoenix
khajiit (frequently indistinguishable from felids)

Under normal circumstances the answer might be to just create an initiative to fix the mistags and call it a day... but TWYS, taken to its logical extreme, is starting to seem like it's not a tenable position for species tagging and searching. Blatantly incorrect tags like "cat" for any of the images above are easy enough to police on their own, but kumiho and similar would fall into near-uselessness due to how few posts actively justify their inclusion. The precedent of kitsune suggests that they should be aliased away to fox_spirit or similar, and that itself also means an initiative to replace fox_spirit with just plain fox on posts that don't justify the former's inclusion.

I think "Plausible" works for species. As long as it looks like it could be, it works. The first images do not look like toys, so that's not plausible, but monster or demon are if the artist says it's some kind of "plush demon" or such.

The one with text mentions that she was created out of sexual desires, and fuels her magic through human semen, so demon (ie succubus) sounds fitting.
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Fox Spirit relies on having traits beyond just being a fox, so I'd say Kumiho should as well. They're a canine, sure, but you need some kind of demon or spirit traits to determine they're more than that.
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Skaven is more akin to Vulkin or Elf, I'd say it's fine to accept it if the artist says it is, so long as it fits the general description (being a rat person). A generic anthro rat with no from-artist statement that he's Skaven or from Warhammer though, should not be tagged skaven.