Posted under General
I don't really understand how implication works on Danbooru, but a search for black_and_white turns up posts tagged with just monochrome (and not black_and_white) -- and monochrome can be in colors other than black or white.
In related issues: should greyscale be distinguished from black_and_white? The latter implies just black and white, without intermediate tones (as in post #542348).
Updated
Hm, black_and_white appears to be aliased (not implicated) to monochrome.
There can be two types of aliases:
a ↔ b, black_and_white is always monochrome and monochrome is always black_and_white. That isn't the case here.
a → b, black_and_white is always monochrome but monochrome isn't always black_and_white. That is the case here.
The former type always gets an alias, the latter can be handled with either an alias or an implication, depending on whether we think they warrant being maintained as separate ideas. If we don't think they should be, then we alias the narrower to the broader. If we do think they should be, we implicate the narrower to the broader.
What implications do is set a rule such that every time a is used, b is automatically applied to the image. Tag something with striped_panties and panties will automatically be added.
[Sorry if I misinterpreted and you already knew all this, but it sounded like you were unclear on the alias/implication distinction. It's something that trips plenty of people up.]
So I think everyone would agree that black_and_white is a subset of monochrome and its images should always have the monochrome tag. The question is if they should also have the separate black_and_white tag. That would require removing the alias, changing it into an implication, and (ideally) having someone look through 36,000 monochrome images and add black_and_white where needed. Less ideally, we just keep the distinction in mind going forward and don't worry about the older posts.
No, thank you for the explanation :)
It seems like the alias is in the wrong direction, then? Because while it would be logical for a monochrome search to turn up posts only tagged black_and_white, it's not logical for a black_and_white search to turn up posts only tagged monochrome -- if I'm looking for B&W, I don't want to see monochrome blue.
chainedwind said: It seems like the alias is in the wrong direction, then? Because while it would be logical for a monochrome search to turn up posts only tagged black_and_white, it's not logical for a black_and_white search to turn up posts only tagged monochrome -- if I'm looking for B&W, I don't want to see monochrome blue.
Well, that is the question. It's not necessarily wrong, as black_and_white is a subset of monochrome which was at some point (long ago, I'm guessing) deemed not to be sufficiently important to warrant its own tag.
And we can't alias it the other way - monochrome to black_and_white would make every monochrome tag disappear and be replaced with black_and_white, which would be incorrect. So those monochrome blues would be retagged black_and_white.
Think of it this way: we don't have separate tags for monochome blue or monochrome red or monochrome green. It would be expected that someone looking for them would simply search monochrome. So the same logic is being applied to black_and_white (which is basically monochrome black).
What we need to determine is if the preponderance of black as the main color in so many monochrome images warrants making a special exception for it that we don't make for blue, red, orange, purple, etc. And that determination needs to take into account the amount of work that would be involved in separating them.
Hrm. And the process of aliasing discards the original information, correct? So that changing the alias to an implication wouldn't help at all.
Fff. I would totally volunteer to go through all, uh, 1700 pages of |monochrome -sepia|, but I'm trying to see that |solo| makes it to all the posts it should and people seem to be very ew about that.
I would still say it's wrong, in the sense that black_and_white should never equal blue. Would it at least help to stem the future tide by removing the alias?
chainedwind said: Hrm. And the process of aliasing discards the original information, correct? So that changing the alias to an implication wouldn't help at all.
It would help going forward, just not with old posts that need to be re-checked.
I would still say it's wrong, in the sense that black_and_white should never equal blue.
It's not saying that black_and_white equals blue (or red or yellow or green). It's saying it equals monochrome. More specifically, it's saying "There is no black_and_white tag in use on Danbooru, but here's a broader concept we use instead: monochrome. Under monochrome you will find, among other things, black_and_white images". That's how it's been for years. Policies and tag definitions can be changed, but more people need to weigh in before I decide anything there.
I think there's no real harm to making black_and_white separate with an implication. It's a potentially useful tag (in the same line as the color tags, I can see someone wanting to specify it), it doesn't really have any internal problems that I can see (it's unambiguous, etc), and basically it seems more valuable to save that distinction rather than folding it entirely into monochrome, even if many existing images won't be fully tagged (after all, almost every tag has that limitation.)
Plus, it will always be easy to eliminate the black_and_white tag later on by turning it into an alias if we change our mind... but images that are currently losing the distinction are impossible to recover it for without going through and retagging them by hand.
Tags are cheap, right?
Updated
^^^ What. I don't follow what you're saying. You're saying we should go through and manually add the b&w tag to all these images so some time down the road when we decide it was stupid to un-alias them we can... re-alias them after doing ...more work?
I personally don't see the point in undoing an alias that has been around since before I had an account and is already pretty much the entirety of the result tag but whatever.
Log said:
I personally don't see the point in undoing an alias that has been around since before I had an account and is already pretty much the entirety of the result tag but whatever.
The point is that the existing alias returns results that directly contradict the search term.
