Danbooru

Fix implication chain mauser_c96 -> pistol -> handgun

Posted under Tags

I've never really understood why we distinguish pistols and handguns to the point where we have to have two different tags for them, when 99% of the times they're just going to overlap.

It's already impossible to search for one-hand submachine guns because almost all the posts under submachine_gun handgun contain both pistols and submachine guns (and ironically even the wiki for handgun mentions that small enough submachine guns are just called machine pistols).

I'm looking at the Wikipedia page and even something like this which would be an understandable argument for keeping them separate is just called a pistol.

Why not just alias pistol to handgun?

Yeah, yeah, a revolver handgun is not a pistol, but who's going to search for handgun -pistol to find revolvers? They're just going to search for revolver.

Updated

nonamethanks said:

I'm looking at the Wikipedia page and even something like this which would be an understandable argument for keeping them separate is just called a pistol.

Not really. I linguistics, the history of a word (even more so the history of the thing the word is referring to) is irrelevant when analyzing the current usage and meaning. Past and current do not mix.

nonamethanks said:

Why not just alias pistol to handgun?

Yeah, yeah, a revolver handgun is not a pistol, but who's going to search for handgun -pistol to find revolvers? They're just going to search for revolver.

Why not just keep the ontology straight and use tag implications to reflect the semantic fields of plain English words though?
I see exactly 0 gain in creating a new lingo because of "practical" (not really) considerations of how people [mis]use the tags currently.

Updated

Ixendr said:

Why not just keep the ontology straight and use tag implications to reflect the semantic fields of plain English words though?
I see exactly 0 gain in creating a new lingo because of "practical" (not really) considerations of how people [mis]use the tags currently.

Because we're a site for the aggregation of anime art, not a dictionary. If 99% of our users cannot tell apart two technical concepts involving tens of thousands of posts then trying to keep them separate is an exercise in futility.
The only reason to keep them apart would be so that people can search for handguns that are not pistols. Given that the vast majority of handgun -pistol are pistols, and that people regularly mistag revolvers as pistols (revolver pistol), and given that the two terms are pretty much synonyms for non-gun experts, then that reason is moot.

Think about this from a practical perspective: are you going to sort through tens of thousands of mistags to fix them, and keep monitoring the tag to fix future mistags? If not, then who's going to do this? The extent of mistags that nobody has cared so far to fix is evidence enough of how silly this forced distinction is and how little the average user cares.

Updated

nonamethanks said:

Because we're a site for the aggregation of anime art, not a dictionary. If 99% of our users cannot tell apart two technical concepts involving tens of thousands of posts then trying to keep them separate is an exercise in futility.
The only reason to keep them apart would be so that people can search for handguns that are not pistols. Given that the vast majority of handgun -pistol are pistols, and that people regularly mistag revolvers as pistols (revolver pistol), and given that the two terms are pretty much synonyms for non-gun experts, then that reason is moot.

Yet the two proposals - to keep things straight and to make them convoluted/oversimplified - bear the same technical cost. An implication over an alias. Keeping things oversimplified for the sake of oversimplification is just shortsightedness.

nonamethanks said:

Think about this from a practical perspective: are you going to sort through tens of thousands of mistags to fix them, and keep monitoring the tag to fix future mistags? If not, then who's going to do this? The extent of mistags that nobody has cared so far to fix is evidence enough of how silly this forced distinction is and how little the average user cares.

So, because mistags happen, let's have a global, alias-level mistag?
And if you defend average users not caring, why do you care either of ways?

Then, how are you going to tag e.g. handheld laser/energetic weapons (very common in sci-fi), which are different from both pistols and revolvers?
Of course, you can make an argument to systematically mistag them, or not tag them at all.
But then - why properly tag anything and have any ontology in the first place?

Well we can argue all we want about semantics but there are 11k posts under handgun -pistol, and most of those are things that the average user would call pistols, so if nobody is going to fix the thousands of mistags then any discussion about semantics is pointless. We should not be harming the majority of our users just to cater to a small subset of gun fetishists.

For scifi weapons we have ray gun and laser rifle, not sure if there's others. If you want to search for other specialized concepts you're free to make and populate a tag for it, but that has nothing to do with handgun vs pistol.
If you're trying to search for non-pistols in handgun then it's already impossible.

Ixendr said:

So, because mistags happen, let's have a global, alias-level mistag?
And if you defend average users not caring, why do you care either of ways?

Then, how are you going to tag e.g. handheld laser/energetic weapons (very common in sci-fi), which are different from both pistols and revolvers?
Of course, you can make an argument to systematically mistag them, or not tag them at all.
But then - why properly tag anything and have any ontology in the first place?

I'm actually not sure what you're asking, here. We have an energy gun tag. We also have laser rifle. A handgun is just any gun small enough to be used with one hand, so it should be applicable to small energy weapons. Handgun energy_gun does in fact return results. Aliasing pistol to handgun doesn't really affect this, unless you're trying to say that those weapons should be tagged as pistols.

I think you should answer the question posed to you, even if hypothetical. Are you going to fix and maintain these two tags? I'm not. No one has cared enough to do so before now. There's no point keeping pistol and handgun separate if no one is keeping them sorted.

Gun nuts and sword fetishists and every other obsessed hobbyist always do this. They argue against aliasing/implicating/nuking tags people either aren't using or are misusing 90% of the time, rendering them useless, and then a year later have done nothing to clean up the mess they insisted needed stay.

nonamethanks said:

Well we can argue all we want about semantics but there are 11k posts under handgun -pistol, and most of those are things that the average user would call pistols, so if nobody is going to fix the thousands of mistags then any discussion about semantics is pointless. We should not be harming the majority of our users just to cater to a small subset of gun fetishists.

For scifi weapons we have ray gun and laser rifle, not sure if there's others. If you want to search for other specialized concepts you're free to make and populate a tag for it, but that has nothing to do with handgun vs pistol.
If you're trying to search for non-pistols in handgun then it's already impossible.

Okay, I see your point now.

But... My original proposition to fix the specific mauser_c96 case is a trivial change.
It dos not harm anything and does not have any potential to cause harm relative to current state of things.

nonamethanks's proposition is a much more far-reaching.
Why did we end up discussing them as contrary to one another when they are in fact two separate issues?

Updated

Ixendr said:

Why did we end up discussing them as contrary to one another when they are in fact two separate issues?

Well, this issue encompasses everything regarding handguns vs pistols, including this implication swap, so it makes sense to raise the point rather than approving this implication only to collapse it afterwards anyway.

I imagine gun nuts do in fact want to search for pistols and not get revolvers and phasers.

Its a bit sad that none of them care enough to look through handgun -pistol and tag it but an alias seems like an overreaction to me.

The distinction is supposed to be that pistol is for semiautomatic pistols and handgun is for all types of pistols. But taggers can't keep this distinction straight and semiauto pistols are the majority anyway, so it doesn't make sense to have a special subtag just for them. Just like how we have a subtag for bolt action rifles but not for semiauto rifles, because semiauto rifles are the default.

Also the implication hierarchy is all fucked up here. Nearly every tag currently implying handgun should have implied pistol instead, because most are semiauto pistols. But if we actually did that we'd have a five-level deep hierarchy: mauser_c96 -> pistol -> handgun -> gun -> weapon. That's too much, it's a sign we're overcategorizing things.

1