I was thinking we should do something with the chipmunk and squirrel tags, since there is a lot of overlap between them and their specific ear and tail tags. I don't have a preference on how we go about it, but I do think the relationship between these tags needs to be clarified since some see chipmunks as something completely separate from squirrel.

If we make chipmunk a subset of squirrel, I was thinking that it might be better to use the term striped_squirrel, since chipmunks are not the only type of squirrel with stripes.

Interesting, despite what you are saying (and what wikipedia says), I've never considered chipmunks as a type of squirrel. I mean they are similar, but quite visually distinct. To me squirrel is more or less exclusively American grey squirrels or European red squirrels. I'd probably prefer we keep them separate for just that reason.

I've honestly never considered chipmunks a type of squirrel either, and have also always thought of squirrel as American grey squirrel when thinking of squirrels.

One part of the reason for bringing it up though, as going by wikipedia, Chipmunks are almost exclusively a North American thing with only one species actually existing outside of North America, so other countries (particularly Japan) might not really see this difference. This is also not taking into account all the species that pop up on wikipedia doing a striped squirrel search, which could also blur the lines.

The main reason though is the squirrel tag is filled with a lot of what would tagged chipmunk, as well as tags like squirrel_ears and squirrel_tail. To be honest, we'd actually lose most of what would be tagged with any of the squirrel tags since art seems to favor the chipmunk pattern (though the tails never did seem all that chipmunk-ish outside of the pattern).

I'd suspect with the two separate, squirrel would be a minimally populated tag. That though would be simply something drawn upon by differences in cultures, like how we'd more easily get images of tanuki than raccoons from Japan. While the Japanese have single color squirrels, the art clearly shows favoritism towards the chipmunk or stripped patterns.

While chipmunks may be a North American phenomenon, this is also a largely North American site in terms of tagging so I think it's reasonable to keep these separate. I guess it depends oh how precise we want to be...

I think I'd rather just implicate chipmunk -> squirrel, so non-chipmunks incorrectly tagged as chipmunks will at least have squirrel as well. That's the easy way out, at any rate... so I'll do that for now.