Vietnam War tags

BUR #40902 has been rejected.

create alias viet_cong -> national_liberation_front_of_south_vietnam
create alias viet_cong_flag -> national_liberation_front_of_south_vietnam_flag

"National Liberation Front" is the actual name of the organization of communist guerrilla fighters in South Vietnam; "Viet Cong" ("Red Vietnamese") was the insult created by the South Vietnamese government to refer to them. However, because Viet Cong is the way the larger world has learned to refer to them, I want to provide a utility alias instead of simply renaming the tags.

"national liberation front" is extremely unclear and ambiguous as far as tag names go, and "viet cong" is what most people know them as. Even Wikipedia uses that term. I think it would be quite pointless and confusing for us to do this.

That's not even considering the various other national liberation fronts of the world. From a cursory and very incomplete search:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_for_Liberation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_Front_of_Corsica
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_Front_of_Angola

nonamethanks said:

"national liberation front" is extremely unclear and ambiguous as far as tag names go, and "viet cong" is what most people know them as. Even Wikipedia uses that term. I think it would be quite pointless and confusing for us to do this.

That's not even considering the various other national liberation fronts of the world. From a cursory and very incomplete search:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_for_Liberation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_Front_of_Corsica
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_Front_of_Angola

The fact that most people know it as Viet Cong is exactly why we should do an Alias instead of a rename. As for the name confusion, its full name is "National Liberation Front of South Vietnam", so I can have the tag be that if you'd rather.

Ordinarily I'd agree, but we seem to be renaming several tags to more official names, why should Viet Cong be left the outlier?

Because "viet cong" is short, unambiguous and everyone knows what it means. You're proposing going from that to a term that only historians interested in the Vietnam war and Vietnamese users (a small portion of our traffic) will know, and for no benefit. There's no point.

BUR #40924 has been rejected.

create alias national_liberation_front_of_south_vietnam -> viet_cong
create alias national_liberation_front_of_south_vietnam_flag -> viet_cong_flag

I think this is a good compromise.

The bulk update request #40902 (forum #351089) has been rejected by @Historyanon.

The bulk update request #40924 (forum #351164) has been rejected by @nonamethanks.

The chance someone would search for that instead of just viet cong is zero.

nonamethanks said:

The chance someone would search for that instead of just viet cong is zero.

Why though? It was possible to search that alone instead of just Viet Cong though.

AbsoluteRainbow said:

Why though? It was possible to search that alone instead of just Viet Cong though.

Because they are not active tags. The purpose of an alias as used here is, "here are two names people use to search for this, if we alias them, then a search for one tag one will automatically change their search to the other".

The original BUR, aliasing "Viet Cong" to NLF, would have created two new tags and aliased VC to them, for the purposes of changing our tag from VC to the organization's actual name. The consensus was that it was not worth pursuing, which is why I rejected the BUR.

Siegfried's BUR would have created two brand new, unused tags, that consensus held would rarely be searched by anyone who didn't also know Viet Cong, for no other purpose than to alias them. That's neither helpful nor useful to anyone, and is frankly a BUR made for no other reason than to make a BUR. It's useless busywork for NNT, and Siegfried doing lots of shit like this is one of the big reasons why he got demoted.