Danbooru

Add alias for "America" tag

Posted under Tags

nonamethanks said:

South America is America too.

If you're referring specifically to South America, then it would be called South America instead of just America. America on its own normally refers either to the United States or the entire North and South American continents, but if you're referring to both continents then it'd be commonly called the "Americas" instead of the singular.

BUR #12298 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create alias usa_(country) -> united_states
create alias america -> united_states
remove alias america -> united_states
create alias america_(country) -> united_states
deprecate america

Here's the reverse alias.
United_States seems like the best main tag and it's what Wikipedia uses
I thought about also aliasing u.s.a._(country), but I left it off because I wasn't sure if it was necessary.

Edit: BUR updated based on other's input:

BUR used to be

create alias usa_(country) -> united_states
create alias america -> united_states

Updated

mongirlfan said:

United States of America is the complete and more appropriate name for the tag, while America should be a disambiguation page.

Its fine, no one is going to mistake the tag for the United states of Neptune. I agree that America should eventually be deprecated instead of aliased but for now the alias should remain while people gets used to it.

mongirlfan said:

United States of America is the complete and more appropriate name for the tag

Yeah, but "United States" is a much more common name for the country. I've only really heard people say "United States of America" in political or patriotic speeches.

Even when subtracting all "United States of America" results from "United States" Google searches (because I couldn't figure out how to exclude overlap between the words) there's still 8 times more results for "United States" .
United States (3,680,000,000)
United States of America (381,000,000)
US -all USoA results = 3,299,000,000

mongirlfan, ion288, and sadodere all said something along the lines of:

America should be a disambiguation page.

The only time I've ever heard people use the word America to refer to anything other than the US is when they're saying something like "technically the word America refers to the entire content, so it shouldn't be used to refer to just the USA".
The word for something that's from the US is American, news organizations frequently use "America" to refer to the US, the US flag is most commonly referred to as the "American flag"; so while it may be technically correct to not use the word America to refer to the US, that ship's already sailed.

Also, I don't really understand what else the disambiguation page would point to. It's not like we have the tags for north_america, south_america, or the americas.

Omo_Fan said:

Yeah, but "United States" is a much more common name for the country. I've only really heard people say "United States of America" in political or patriotic speeches.

Even when subtracting all "United States of America" results from "United States" Google searches (because I couldn't figure out how to exclude overlap between the words) there's still 8 times more results for "United States" .
United States (3,680,000,000)
United States of America (381,000,000)
US -all USoA results = 3,299,000,000

I believe United States of America is more appropriate because it's the full form of the USA abbreviation, but I don't really mind if United States is more popular or more users prefer it like this.

Omo_Fan said:
The only time I've ever heard people use the word America to refer to anything other than the US is when they're saying something like "technically the word America refers to the entire content, so it shouldn't be used to refer to just the USA".
The word for something that's from the US is American, news organizations frequently use "America" to refer to the US, the US flag is most commonly referred to as the "American flag"; so while it may be technically correct to not use the word America to refer to the US, that ship's already sailed.

Also, I don't really understand what else the disambiguation page would point to. It's not like we have the tags for north_america, south_america, or the americas.

Well, because America has various different meanings and purposes as a word. We already have different tags with the name America in danbooru. America or Americo is a name for people as well. And yet, there's still the undeniable fact that America is a whole continent, not only the US (which as a country, it is part of North America). All these reasons makes the word America ambiguous by nature. We know Danbooru is a english speaking site, but I highly doubt users are all US american or has solely the US american opinion/view over things.

mongirlfan said:

Well, because America has various different meanings and purposes as a word. We already have different tags with the name America in danbooru. America or Americo is a name for people as well. And yet, there's still the undeniable fact that America is a whole continent, not only the US (which as a country, it is part of North America). All these reasons makes the word America ambiguous by nature. We know Danbooru is a english speaking site, but I highly doubt users are all US american or has solely the US american opinion/view over things.

Is there any evidence that the America tag has been used for anything other than images referencing the United States? If the user base is simply only using it for the US, then it's kind of pointless to retain it as a deprecated tag if no one is using it for any of the hypothetical alternatives.

I updated the BUR so that it replaces the america -> united_states alias with america_(country) -> united_states so as to remove any ambiguity while still pointing users to the right tag.
I also added "deprecate america" to the BUR due to the input of many users.

Notes

  • I just remembered that there are other countries that have used "United States" as part of their name in the past, but they all changed their name quite a while ago so I don't think that's enough of a reason to make the main tag United_States_of_America.
  • I don't really know what the disambiguation page should look like, so I'll leave that up to someone else.

Omo_Fan said:

The only time I've ever heard people use the word America to refer to anything other than the US is when they're saying something like "technically the word America refers to the entire content, so it shouldn't be used to refer to just the USA".
The word for something that's from the US is American, news organizations frequently use "America" to refer to the US, the US flag is most commonly referred to as the "American flag"; so while it may be technically correct to not use the word America to refer to the US, that ship's already sailed.

Also, I don't really understand what else the disambiguation page would point to. It's not like we have the tags for north_america, south_america, or the americas.

People actually usually just say "US" rather than "America"? Even people foreign to the US. We could always add "united_states_of_america" as an alias if needed so "America" will come up when searched (or: this could be an argument to use the full United States of America tag rather than just United States).

EDIT: I'm agreeing that "America" tag name should be changed, not agreeing with the BUR.

Also... North America and South America aren't countries...? So this point is irrelevant. No reason for those tags to exist.

I don't really know what the disambiguation page should look like, so I'll leave that up to someone else.

We could always just. Say it's a disambiguation page. If it's a big problem, we could list the countries in the Americas there as well?

Updated

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