Upon reading forum #73916, I was reminded of one issue that I've been wanting to ask for a while now: What should users do when they want a new tag to be populated? Is it generally good etiquette to bear the brunt of the work themselves and expect little contribution from other users, or make a forum thread asking for help?

I can think of a few tags which are sufficiently common that the regular taggers should become aware of, but can apply to so many images that it would be virtually impossible to tag alone. I tried manually populating alternate_eye_color a while ago before realizing that it would be nearly impossible to do alone due to my lack of comprehensive knowledge about every character from every series. Is there a thread or wiki page to which highly underpopulated tags can be added, both to raise awareness that said tags exist and to help them become more useful by encouraging community work? I would appreciate knowing.

Aristocrat said:
Is it generally good etiquette to bear the brunt of the work themselves and expect little contribution from other users, or make a forum thread asking for help?

Both. Get other people to notice the tag by tagging loads of images people will look at (which basically means recent posts).

I do find it amazing, however, that even as developed as danbooru's wiki is, most new posts still only have about 10 tags. Aside from sketches and portraits, I've never come across an image with 10 tags that I couldn't think of 20 or even 30 other tags for in a few seconds.

Yes, make a forum post about such new tags for 2 reasons:

1. Do you know how annoying it is to find such a tag months after its creation and be reminded of all the images you could have tagged by now if only you knew about it?

2. The new tag is immediately discussed which should lead to less useless tags overall.

alternate_eye_color I find a little silly. It's so much work to check external sources to find out all canon eye colors a character has been depicted with. Character wikis would have to include a description of a character's basic appearance (hair color, hair length, eye color, clothes (hat, upper body, lower body, shoes), accessories , age, skin color, race, any other features (animal_ears, etc.) ) to facilitate tagging.

Serlo said:
Aside from sketches and portraits, I've never come across an image with 10 tags that I couldn't think of 20 or even 30 other tags for in a few seconds.

post #113189
post #436968
post #677975

Huh, seems I'm completely wrong on that statement. I just had a browse around the 1000th posts page, and most of them are tagged pretty well. Maybe I've just had bad tagging runs.

S1eth said:
Yes, make a forum post about such new tags

Maybe this can be the start of a "population request" thread (and hopefully it could include older, forgotten tags too). If so, I've been tagging clothing length tags a lot recently.

• long sleeves
• short sleeves
• long skirt
• microskirt
• miniskirt
• long dress
• short dress
  

S1eth said:
Yes, make a forum post about such new tags for 2 reasons:

1. Do you know how annoying it is to find such a tag months after its creation and be reminded of all the images you could have tagged by now if only you knew about it?

2. The new tag is immediately discussed which should lead to less useless tags overall.

+1

S1eth said:
alternate_eye_color I find a little silly. It's so much work to check external sources to find out all canon eye colors a character has been depicted with.

I would say that this tag is meant to be useful ONLY to users who have this knowledge, and should be tagged only by them as well.
I don't really like thinking about the problems this tag would have with complicated characters as you said, however it's easy to see how useful it is for simpler characters. I had the same idea when finding post #805227 because that's literally the only time I've ever seen Orin with blue eyes.

I don't think it should rely on what's canon either, because Kirisame_Marisa is often seen with blue, brown, black or even green eyes when her only canon color is yellow.
So what matters IMO for the tag to be meaningful is frequency in fanart, and this means only long time lurkers/taggers should take care of it.

Yeah, I was talking about Touhou characters and their switching eye colors, since I use danbooru mostly for browsing and tagging that series and even I don't know all eye colors every character has had in any canon appearance.
Kirisame_Marisa has always yellow/gold/orange/brown eyes and in her first appearance, red eyes.
Konpaku_Youmu had red, blue, teal, green and grey eyes.
Hakurei_Reimu had purple, red, blue (IaMP), brown-yellow, brown-red, brown, black, grey eyes.
Some characters switch their eye color to red when they use certain abilities (Youmu and Sakuya) or have had red eyes only when they first appeared.

I don't fully agree with basing it on frequency of fanart because I think that trying to do so, such as with the "most unlikely X" pools, has just created chaos. It also isn't intuitive for users of the alternate_hair_color tag.

A population request thread will never ever happen it has been brought up twice before with much resistance. There's at most 100, probably closer to 50, people who actively use the forums. There are minimum 100 times that in active users.

Serlo said:

• long sleeves
• short sleeves
• long skirt
• microskirt
• miniskirt
• long dress
• short dress
  

Maybe more people would use those tags if they
a) found them necessary
b) knew when to tag them

I've never used microskirt since I find miniskirt to be sufficient for short skirts. Just like that, short_dress is tagged because it reveals a lot, long_dress is just what a dress is assumed to be, so it isn't used.

Log said:
A population request thread will never ever happen it has been brought up twice before with much resistance. There's at most 100, probably closer to 50, people who actively use the forums. There are minimum 100 times that in active users.

According to the tag updates page with limit set to 50 and the earliest starting date that doesn't give my "database timed out" ( 2011-08-01 ), I get this:
jxh2154 55.3%
many are alias and mass edits.
Top 50 29.5% or 66% without jxh2154
Rest 15.2% or 34% without jxh2154

So the top 50 taggers (top 49 actually) create 2/3 of all tag edits on danbooru that aren't aliases. If you run it with the same input, you'll see that most of the top 50 taggers are also often seen posting on the forum. If you get a 30-40 of these people to use a new tag regularly, awareness of it will spread among non-forum users as well.

I'm not talking about a thread like Serlo proposes, which would be a list of underused tags, because there is often a reason why a tag is underused that needs to be discussed. I'm more talking about "I propose a new tag X with definition Y. 1. Discuss it and 2. if it's useful, be aware that it exists)" threads.

I was addressing Serlo's request, your suggestion is more or less fine, it's already been done in the past. As long as you don't repeatedly bump the thread if it gets no replies as some users are apt to do.

Aristocrat said:
Upon reading forum #73916, I was reminded of one issue that I've been wanting to ask for a while now: What should users do when they want a new tag to be populated? Is it generally good etiquette to bear the brunt of the work themselves and expect little contribution from other users, or make a forum thread asking for help?

Both, though tagging work is a long and unrewarding task. Don't be surprised if everyone doesn't jump at the chance to help out.

Personally, I've been on a month and a half tagging project (plaid vest) that's been side tracked for what looks to be a 1-2 week effort to go through monochrome for multiple monochrome images and for the various dominant color tags. Tagging can take a surprising amount of work.

It's not like the translation request thread or the deletion appeal thread, where you're asking for no more than a few minutes or hours of someone's time.

(As for alternate eye color specifically, I almost think there should be a rule not to bother on the Touhou series given how often colors fluctuate in canon.)