Stallion is not an alias for horse. Stallion is a male, intact (not castrated) adult horse. Searching “stallion” and seeing it’s an alias for horse means that I cannot narrow my search to male horses (there are relatively few posts of castrated animals anyway) because “horse” encompasses both male and female specimens. On that note, I would like mare to be unlinked from horse as well, on the same grounds but for its respective gender. Thank you.
Topic: De-alias stallion from horse.
Posted under General
We don't do gender specific species tags as a rule. No need to have 6 times the species tags.
gewehr said:
Stallion is not an alias for horse. Stallion is a male, intact (not castrated) adult horse. Searching “stallion” and seeing it’s an alias for horse means that I cannot narrow my search to male horses (there are relatively few posts of castrated animals anyway) because “horse” encompasses both male and female specimens. On that note, I would like mare to be unlinked from horse as well, on the same grounds but for its respective gender. Thank you.
search horse male for male horses only
search horse female for female horses only
no need for individual tags for mare or stallion, that's why they were aliased
gendered species tags would be undoable for several reasons 1) not all species have special names for their males and females (and some, like horses, have more for stuff like the juveniles as well) 2) we don't have a clean way to handle intersex characters (ought we just awkwardly make up 4 more derivative tagnames?), 3) unimaginable levels of tag bloat with little-to-no actual utility.
just, like, search horse male equine_penis or something.
Stallion and mare should be unaliased from horse- and aliased to equid instead. I suspect these aliases might be responsible for a number of these horse ~zebra ~donkey ~mule solo
And on that note, alias equine to equid as well. There are almost no valid instances of equid -equine.
regsmutt said:
Outside of equids I'm not aware of another animal that uses the term. But I can see people using them for gynomorphs/andromorphs/etc.
Stallion is also used to describe men sometimes, to me the term feels more like a species specific gender identifier than a gender specific species identifier, so aliasing to gender makes more sense to me. But I don't know how other users would see it.
smallgreybird said:
Stallion is also used to describe men sometimes, to me the term feels more like a species specific gender identifier than a gender specific species identifier, so aliasing to gender makes more sense to me. But I don't know how other users would see it.
See, I don't think that has really caused many problems with tagging. It's a slang term, yes. In slang it has multiple definitions depending on where you are, including a usage for women. These uses though are still not common enough to cause many issues.
dba_afish said:
do you think we should also change the alias of cow from cattle to female?
Cow has pretty much become the generic term for cattle in the English language, even though it does also apply to other animals, like elephants. Stallion and mare shouldn't be aliased to horse, but they could probably be aliased to equid without causing any weird issues. I can see how aliasing them to gender tags might make them less useful for searching.
thegreatwolfgang said:
Arguably, bitch is aliased to female, but I prefer aliasing them to their respective animal instead.
I think bitch has the opposite problem, where the reference to a female dog isn't really the most common usage of the term any more.
Most of you have suggested that "stallion" and "mare" be aliased to "male" and "female," respectively. The problem with this is that this doesn't account for an image of a male horse and a female character of different species when the user searches "horse mare," nor vice versa. So even if someone types in one tag, they might get a horse of the other gender because the aliases account for all species of a certain gender. This could confuse some people.
gewehr said:
Most of you have suggested that "stallion" and "mare" be aliased to "male" and "female," respectively. The problem with this is that this doesn't account for an image of a male horse and a female character of different species when the user searches "horse mare," nor vice versa. So even if someone types in one tag, they might get a horse of the other gender because the aliases account for all species of a certain gender. This could confuse some people.
counterpoint: that's just too bad, it's not going to happen.
creating and managing these tags would be a nightmare because, if this change was made, it's not just mare and stallion that are in question, it is every species. every species tag (at some taxonomic cutoff) would get seven new tags. nobody is going to want to deal with that amount of effectively useless tag bloat.
The better solution would be to do a system rewrite where all tags can be tied to specific characters (a female who is blonde, a female who is a horse, a female who is doing a specific activity, a female version of a specific character, etc.) instead of making a combinatorial tag explosion for every species, gender, etc.
lafcadio said:
The better solution would be to do a system rewrite where all tags can be tied to specific characters (a female who is blonde, a female who is a horse, a female who is doing a specific activity, a female version of a specific character, etc.) instead of making a combinatorial tag explosion for every species, gender, etc.
That would be nice, problem is that it's unlikely to be implemented, and less likely to get used by more than a fraction of the community if it did
lafcadio said:
The better solution would be to do a system rewrite where all tags can be tied to specific characters (a female who is blonde, a female who is a horse, a female who is doing a specific activity, a female version of a specific character, etc.) instead of making a combinatorial tag explosion for every species, gender, etc.
I feel like I've heard this suggestion before, while I can't even fully conceptualize how something like this would function, I can say this would largely have all of the same problems with just making infinitly specific hybridized tags just without actually creating new tags.
instead we'd have to decide what tags can be parent to what other tags and decide if that's something that should kept in the staff's hands to only be decided by BUR or just let the member-level user masses figure it out for themselves. and when it's all said and done, there'd be an unimaginably higher level of work hoisted onto uploaders and taggers. all this for what would be, in all honesty, a feature with neigh-zero functional utility.