Versperus added a feedback note to me of: "Please actually review the wiki for our lore tags, they are not applicable on posts that the visuals match what you want the lore tag to be."

The female_(lore) tag wiki, in fact, does not say this: https://e621.net/wiki_pages/29710

> Tag for characters that are deemed to be or identify as female by the artist, regardless of the physical or biological sex they are depicted as in the post.

It doesn't say to avoid tagging female_(lore) if the depiction looks female, it in fact specifically says to tag "regardless" of how they are depicted ("the visuals" as Versperus put it).

The "howto:tag genders" page says something different: https://e621.net/wiki_pages/3294

> Please note that a character should not be tagged with the same general and lore tag.

This contradicts the female_(lore) wiki, and furthermore, the next sentence:

> For example, if a character is female by lore, and gets the female gender tag, then female_(lore) does not need to be applied in addition.

"does not need to be applied" suggests that it, in fact, can be applied. So the "howto:tag genders" page has conflicting instructions within the same paragraph.

This needs to be fixed, there is conflicting information within wiki pages, between wiki pages and each other, and and between wiki pages and moderator feedback.

Personally, my opinion is that the lore tag should be always allowed. That way people can search for female_(lore) and similar tags and get images with canonically female characters in them. It's not possible to recreate this search if we disallow this. For example, ~female ~female_(lore) doesn't work because it may contain characters that look female but are not, and ~female ~female_(lore) -intersex -male will exclude posts with multiple characters. Aside from that, it's also just very clear to have the tags in place. I'm not suggesting that we go on a campaign to retag all posts, I'm saying we should stop taking moderator action against people who tag accurate lore information on posts.

aaronfranke said:
"does not need to be applied" suggests that it, in fact, can be applied. So the "howto:tag genders" page has conflicting instructions within the same paragraph.

This needs to be fixed, there is conflicting information within wiki pages, between wiki pages and each other, and and between wiki pages and moderator feedback.

I'd change the wiki to say "should not be applied", and reword "regardless of the physical or biological sex they are depicted as" to clarify it means when they're not already depicted visually as female and regardless of what else they may look like visually.

aaronfranke said:
Personally, my opinion is that the lore tag should be always allowed.

That would mean the vast majority of female posts would also be tagged female_(lore) (same for male with male_(lore), etc), making the tag largely redundant and very difficult to find posts where female_(lore) actually means something useful to the post.

also, intersex_(lore) has this bit:

Note this tag should not be used on its own, one of its more specific variants should be used.

which would seem to contradict my understanding of this tag's use. I thought that this tag was meant to tag characters who canonically had an intersex condition and it was meant to be tagged separately from how we define intersex as a general tag.

Sometimes I really wish wiki locks were more specific than just staff, leaving keeping up important parts of the wiki to a handful of people, most of which do not actively upkeep the wiki leads to pages falling behind with no one able to update them without creating a ticket or something to alert staff about it
Imagine being able to lock wikis to levels or account age, each would still do the job of curbing abuse

donovan_dmc said:
Sometimes I really wish wiki locks were more specific than just staff, leaving keeping up important parts of the wiki to a handful of people, most of which do not actively upkeep the wiki leads to pages falling behind with no one able to update them without creating a ticket or something to alert staff about it
Imagine being able to lock wikis to levels or account age, each would still do the job of curbing abuse

honestly, wonder if priv+ might could be trusted with editing locked wikis as-is.

dba_afish said:
honestly, wonder if priv+ might could be trusted with editing locked wikis as-is.

Allowing any non-staff to edit any and all pages such as the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Law Enforcement Guidelines, etc is generally a bad idea

donovan_dmc said:
Allowing any non-staff to edit any and all pages such as the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Law Enforcement Guidelines, etc is generally a bad idea

oh... right.

watsit said:
and very difficult to find posts where female_(lore) actually means something useful to the post.

What does that mean? To me, tagging the character's canonical gender always actually means something useful, inherently.

aaronfranke said:
What does that mean? To me, tagging the character's canonical gender always actually means something useful, inherently.

If it's tagged on every single post then it's just gender tags but with a different policy

donovan_dmc said:
If it's tagged on every single post then it's just gender tags but with a different policy

The cases where one applies but not the other are the entire reason why the lore tags exist, so they would not be tagged on every single post, but just many or most of them.

Also: What about posts where no sexual parts are visible, but people can look at the face and say it looks female. Should it be ambiguous + female_(lore), or female without female_(lore)? I would prefer to be able to use female_(lore) as a catch-all for resolving these edge cases, therefore it needs to be taggable on posts with female, in case people can't decide on whether the non-lore tag should be ambiguous or female, the female_(lore) tag would always work.

Also: As a specific example, what about posts with my character, such as my avatar image? Since there's no penis visible, one could make the argument that it's ambiguous, but then others could say that it looks male for one reason or another, such as having a male feather pattern. Again, male_(lore) completely resolves this, if I want to search for canonically male characters then this works for those, while male alone would exclude the few cases where people decide it's ambiguous.

aaronfranke said:
What does that mean? To me, tagging the character's canonical gender always actually means something useful, inherently.

I feel like the gender lore tags are more useful when they function to contradict the general tags. in images with multiple characters tagging like this it makes it easier to tell who the tags are about.

aaronfranke said:
The cases where one applies but not the other are the entire reason why the lore tags exist, so they would not be tagged on every single post, but just many or most of them.

Also: What about posts where no sexual parts are visible, but people can look at the face and say it looks female. Should it be ambiguous + female_(lore), or female without female_(lore)? I would prefer to be able to use female_(lore) as a catch-all for resolving these edge cases, therefore it needs to be taggable on posts with female, in case people can't decide on whether the non-lore tag should be ambiguous or female, the female_(lore) tag would always work.

Also: As a specific example, what about posts with my character, such as my avatar image? Since there's no penis visible, one could make the argument that it's ambiguous, but then others could say that it looks male for one reason or another, such as having a male feather pattern. Again, male_(lore) completely resolves this, if I want to search for canonically male characters then this works for those, while male alone would exclude the few cases where people decide it's ambiguous.

Lore tags don't solve anything here? A gender tag must be decided in the end, either it's ambiguous or it isn't, there is no middle state. If people are arguing escalate it to staff and get the tags locked. The lore tags exist to fix "incorrect" gender tagging, they are not an extension or addition to the gender tags

alright, here's my best example why the tags should function exclusively as "contradictors".
_{I'm going point at Phyco and Llanalu as examples for lore again because they're an easy go-to.}

post #3700463

Phyco, tagged female by TWYS, is a cisgender man (born male, identifies male) who was permanently transformed into female. he gets the male_(lore) tag to denote his unusual status.
Llanalu, tagged male by TWYS, is a cisgender woman (born female, identifies female) wo was permanently transformed into male. she gets the female_(lore) tag to denote her unusual status.

if female_(lore) and male_(lore) were also applied to posts where the characters visuals and lore matched there wouldn't really be a way to tag these characters when they're together (and the same with similar cases).

dba_afish said:
also, intersex_(lore) has this bit:

Note this tag should not be used on its own, one of its more specific variants should be used.

which would seem to contradict my understanding of this tag's use. I thought that this tag was meant to tag characters who canonically had an intersex condition and it was meant to be tagged separately from how we define intersex as a general tag.

See topic #58104 - the wiki still has conflicting instructions with the staff's preferred policy.