I'm talking about bold and italic emphasis that was added (by a single user) to some tag groups. See: tag group:eyes tags, tag group:hair color, tag group:text, tag group:artistic license, tag group:backgrounds, tag group:cards.

I do think that this is not useful and can even be distracting, as well as requiring regular updates. But when I tried to remove it in the past my edits were reverted.

So what other people think about it, should it be removed or not?

Sounds pretty redundant honestly. The bold and italics thing.

Kill it. It is visually distracting rather than helpful.

I think he expanded on what I had done with the list of to aru majutsu no index characters, where at the time I made the list there were a lot of characters that had nearly no images while others had hundreds of images. There were also cases in which the character was only represented by a small image or name block in a character relationship diagram, so I used italics in the character list to indicate that there wasn't any real art for the character.

The whole objective for the use of the italicization and emboldening in a list was to distinguish what had no real artwork, what had only a handful of images (under represented), and what was established. I think that was something that was missed in copying the setup I had done in the Index character list. I also wouldn't really suggest using this setup for general tags, which are more likely to be nuked, merged, or renamed; or deal in image numbers that would be large.

If it's a valid tag, then it should be used as much as possible. Who cares about the number of posts it has? It's distracting.

Well I won't defend my splitting between numbers of images for a tag, I do think my use of italicization was at least valid in the Index character list to indicate that a character tag is in use but there is no real art under the tag. Several characters have their tag existing because they're on this chart, post #557604, from over 2 years ago. Many side characters tend to get little to no art, so changes in image counts tend to be slow to nonexistent the further we get away from an anime (especially characters that did not appear in the anime to begin with).

As for it being distracting, I'd disagree with it being distracting in the Index character list, but I think whether it is distracting or not is a subjective opinion to begin with.

It's pretty much necessary with the index characters list because that cast is massive and only a handful of characters have even a moderate amount of posts.

The tag groups aren't even consistent in how many posts to be highlighted so it's not like you know between articles what's going on (no fixing the numbers would not make this better.)

I think it is interesting to know which tags are most and less used.

The bold/italic in these tag groups don't seem to require constant updates, because the tags grow rather slowly. For exemple, the threshold for "bold and italic" at tag group:hair color is 100,000 posts, a number that is not reached by hair color tags everyday; it is also consistent with hair color tags, that often have hundreds of thousands of posts, since people with hair are virtually everywhere. It would be pointless to add a 100,000 threshold to, say, tag group:meme, because most of them have less than 20 posts anyway, none of them has more than a few hundreds.

That said, I don't mind the decoration being removed, since other people think it should.

I agree that inconsistent text decoration is a bit jarring and distracting, but indicating tag's magnitude is an interesting and potentially useful utility (imagine trying to pick out the main characters for an unfamiliar series with a huge number of background characters for example). Perhaps another style of indication would be less obtrusive?

A symbol to the right or left? Maybe one similar to those used for ranking by Consumer Reports? (○◒◓●) or (○◔◑◕●) A numeric value of some sort?

Unless someone wants to write a script to automate the process of indicating tag magnitude, it seems like a waste of good time.

Honestly it seems more like a greasemonkey script thing, have it fetch tag counts for all the tag grouped tags once a week and generate a tag cloud or something.

Shinjidude said:
I agree that inconsistent text decoration is a bit jarring and distracting, but indicating tag's magnitude is an interesting and potentially useful utility (imagine trying to pick out the main characters for an unfamiliar series with a huge number of background characters for example). Perhaps another style of indication would be less obtrusive?

I understand what you are saying, but this is worthwhile for character listings, not general tags. And even there such indication may become useful only if the list is really large.
Besides, when looking at list of to aru majutsu no index characters, I find the division to groups a lot more helpful than indication of how much images some of those tags have. Perhaps this is all that is needed (at least in most cases).