There's an option that I don't think anyone has brought up yet. (It doesn't address the human/pokemon distinction, but that's a side question from the original one.) Given:
- Danbooru policy is to use original Japanese names
- Pokemon is an exception (for the 'mons only, not the humans) due solely to the ambiguity of said Japanese names
- more recent Danbooru policy is to add copyright qualifiers to remove ambiguity in character names
then there is the possibility of removing the exception, and using the Japanese "name_(pokemon)" as the primary tag for each species.
Advantages:
- consistent with general site policy
- removes the confusion when we start tagging with Japanese names and have to switch to English when they're known later
- new tags can be aliased from the existing ones to minimise user confusion
Disadvantages:
- for older species, many users likely know the English name but not the Japanese one. Aliases should take care of that, though.
- it's a spitload of aliases for the mods to create: in most cases, two per species (unqualified EN -> qualified JP as well as unqualified JP -> qualified JP). However, the same number would be necessary if using qualified EN names as the primary tag instead.
- changing the base name for a character's primary tag is going to confuse people more than just adding a qualifier. Even with aliases, there's probably no way to completely avoid this.
It may very well be that this is judged too disruptive and shot down for that reason. If so, that's fine, but I thought it should at least be suggested.
(For what it's worth on the human/pokemon debate, I think we shouldn't make a distinction in the tags; we have the wiki to provide lists of human vs. 'mon Pokemon characters. However, if we must use one, I'd suggest _(pokemon) for the 'mons, and _(trainer) for the humans. Yes, I know that means changes to tags that would otherwise not be affected, but it's much less ugly than something like _(pkmn).)