Are base pattern tags necessary?

What actual utility do parent tags for patterns like striped, plaid and polka_dot provide? I've been wondering this for some time now, and I can't seem to come up with an answer other than "they give the patterned clothing/object tags something to imply". They seem to serve little purpose other than tag padding and as such they should be nuked.

Searching for them returns a large amount of posts that are completely unrelated save for a pattern that might only be barely visible, and we already have a myriad of patterned_x tags that mitigate the issue this creates when one tried to use searches such as striped shirt. They're not even useful if you wanted to tag, say, something striped that doesn't have a striped_x tag (like a striped gun), because all searches for striped gun will be populated almost exclusively by unrelated clothing and objects (and on occasion, backgrounds) that happen to be striped. The only solution would be to use a search with over 35 tag exclusions for every tag that implies striped, which is absurd and doesn't even resolve the issue.

I want to submit a BUR nuking at least the most egregious of these pointless pattern parent tags, but I would like to hear others' opinions on the matter first seeing as they are somewhat large tags.

For reference, the volume of searches in the last 7 days:

• striped: 1.06k searches from 331 IPs
• plaid: 161 searches, 69 IPs
• polka dot: 134 searches, 63 IPs
• checkered :117 searches, 61 IPs

I think these tags are completely useless. Imagine if we had a "blue clothes" tag. That's what these tags are.

I don't mind if those tags get nuked, but:

Post count for checkered -checkered_*: 5656

Almost all of those cases here are images that are just tagged as "checkered" without any other tag, stating what exactly is checkered here. Especially smaller checkered tags like "checkered obi" would have more images, if people really knew, that such tag existed. I can see how someone tags it "i don't really think there is such a tag" and just leave it as "checkered". Other cases could be, when you can't really tell if something is a shirt or a vest: post #4254446.
Before they get nuked, they should be tagged correctly, or otherwise the information is lost. I didn't check the others, but I guess they suffer the same problem.

Easier way to check: checkered -checkered_*. Wildcards expand to the top 100 matching tags.

But yes, they should be cleaned up first.

nonamethanks said:

Easier way to check: checkered -checkered_*. Wildcards expand to the top 100 matching tags.

Right, I forgot about this one. So it's 5656 cases for checkered, 22258 for striped, 8257 for polka dot and 6704 for plaid.

As an afterthought, the shiny tag also suffers from a similar issue; with the exception of about 4000 posts it's a 160k composite search comprised of implications from shiny_hair shiny_clothes shiny_skin. I want to nuke this pointless tag too.

AngryZapdos said:

As an afterthought, the shiny tag also suffers from a similar issue; with the exception of about 4000 posts it's a 160k composite search comprised of implications from shiny_hair shiny_clothes shiny_skin. I want to nuke this pointless tag too.

I feel the shiny tags in general are pretty useless, they are used very randomly.

I'm conflicted about this, because these tags seem like they could be useful if they were limited to posts themed around a particular pattern, like post #2819031 or post #3949990. On the other hand, as umbrella tags that get implicated by everything with that pattern—no matter how minor a part of the image—they are useless. It's the same as how sky becomes a useless tag when we allow it to be used for things like post #4592795.

That being said, what does this mean for other, less common pattern tags? It seems kind of arbitrary to nuke tags like plaid while retaining tags like cow_print and yagasuri.

iridescent_slime said:

I'm conflicted about this, because these tags seem like they could be useful if they were limited to posts themed around a particular pattern, like post #2819031 or post #3949990. On the other hand, as umbrella tags that get implicated by everything with that pattern—no matter how minor a part of the image—they are useless. It's the same as how sky becomes a useless tag when we allow it to be used for things like post #4592795.

That being said, what does this mean for other, less common pattern tags? It seems kind of arbitrary to nuke tags like plaid while retaining tags like cow_print and yagasuri.

I would argue that cow_print and yagasuri does have more meaning than striped and polka_dot. Cant quite put words to it but I would be more likely to go "ah, thats yagasuri" than "oh, thats checkered". There are other smaller pattern tags like argyle that I dont feel has that value.

Some kind of checkered_theme tag family might be in order for those kind of posts you mentioned.

What stumps me is should we tag stuff like post #4847834 with polka_dot_textbox and post #2817222 with polka_dot_vehicle?

Some things that came up from going through some pics with the striped or polka dot tag but no striped_x or polka_dot_x:

How would this deal with stuff where part of something is striped or polka dot or whatever. eg. I wouldn't tag post #3970531 as striped background but with removing the striped tag it's the only thing left for it.

There's also a LOT of cases where you can't tell what an object is but can tell that it's striped or plaid or whatever.

There also seem to be quite a few cases where one side of a piece of clothing is a pattern but the other not. I can't remember how to deal with these.

This would need the creation of a lot of new tags.

There are also cases like a lot of akitsushima (kancolle) art having a polka dot shirt collar and shirt sleeve cuff - these aspects of an outfit are not usually tagged at all.

Whether or not this goes ahead, at least half of the images with polka dot but no polka_dot_x tags seem to be taggable with polka_dot_x tags, so tagging them up is probably a good thing to do anyway. Striped is a fair bit less, because the preponderance of things that are partially striped.

These tags don't serve much purpose, but unless the existance of these tags are somehow preventing the more detailed tags from being used then I do think they're probably better to have than not. And I didn't think that before actually going through them.

I don't really agree with nuking these at all. As skylightcrystal points out, there is sometimes not a more specific applicable tag to use. I know I've tried to use things like polka dot object, plaid object, etc. as a general descriptor when it doesn't seem worth creating a new tag for a particular object, but they haven't really caught on in use. I do think I've used the base pattern tags at least once before to locate an image. A similarity search is not always going to pull up what you're looking for if an image is cropped or such, so the more unambiguous visual elements tagged in those cases the better.

I'm seeing a lot of mention of using these tags, but only when uploading/tagging. In actual practical terms, using them to search (which is a tags' primary function) is completely useless because of the sheer amount of false positives thrown into the mix. Remember, just because information is present in an image doesn't mean it has to be tagged.

There is an argument to be made about trying to find a specific post you lost by remembering there are stripes in the post. However, even if we could hypothetically use these tags to find posts from memory, the reality is that people are going to remember much more significant details than a pattern. If someone was looking for post #3970531, they'd almost certainly remember the short hair, the cleavage, the shirt, the shorts, the pout. Nobody is going to think to themselves "ah yes, I recall that image having some striped circles in the background". And indeed, if you take a look, that search is all you need to find that post.

That's not a shirt though, it's a camisole. Minor nitpicking but.

Unbreakable said:

That's not a shirt though, it's a camisole. Minor nitpicking but.

Are camisoles not just a type of shirt? The post in question is tagged white_shirt anyway. If we don't want that we should split it into white_camisole, I guess, like we have white tank top. I think that's kind of dumb though.

AngryZapdos said:

There is an argument to be made about trying to find a specific post you lost by remembering there are stripes in the post. However, even if we could hypothetically use these tags to find posts from memory, the reality is that people are going to remember much more significant details than a pattern. If someone was looking for post #3970531, they'd almost certainly remember the short hair, the cleavage, the shirt, the shorts, the pout. Nobody is going to think to themselves "ah yes, I recall that image having some striped circles in the background". And indeed, if you take a look, that search is all you need to find that post.

You say that, and yet I still remember post #1822826 after gardening it seven years ago only because (a) there was a girl wearing conspicuous stripes and (b) she was climbing over a cargo net. I couldn't recall what specific article of clothing was striped, and until I found the post again I assumed it was probably her legwear. I didn't even remember there being another girl in the image. Sometimes a prominent pattern is the most memorable part of an image.

I think these tags need at the very least to be moved to checkered clothes etc. A checkered tag is useless for the same reason as topic #19729. Right now we're lumping checkered background, checkered floor and checkered skirt in the same tag. That's dumb.

nonamethanks said:

I think these tags need at the very least to be moved to checkered clothes etc. A checkered tag is useless for the same reason as topic #19729. Right now we're lumping checkered background, checkered floor and checkered skirt in the same tag. That's dumb.

+1