Alias leek -> spring_onion

The bulk update request #10642 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create alias leek -> spring_onion

This issue was brought up previously in topic #18542, which dealiased the 2 tags. It was argued that the 2 are very distinct and should be separated.

However, leek is currently predominantly filled with images that should be tagged spring_onion, such as Miku holding one. Contrarily, farfetch'd, who is supposed to be holding a leek, is rarely tagged with it. The image used in the original dealias request is also misleading. While it distinguishes between leeks and spring onions, welsh onions are also a type of spring onion and seem to be at least one of the things negi refers to.

Additionally, in art, it is difficult to tell the difference between the two, particularly when they are simplified into the typical depiction of a white stalk with 2 green leaves. Artists then warp the scale and shape of the vegetable, making identifications hard, particularly for inattentive taggers. Many English speakers also refer to the spring onion Miku holds as a leek, which further adds to the confusion. It doesn't make sense to differentiate between the 2 for tagging purposes when only a small portion of posts even bother adding detail beyond the basic Y-shaped vegetable and I can count posts I found from leek that definitively depict a leek on one hand.

Zumzigzoo said:

However, leek is currently predominantly filled with images that should be tagged spring_onion, such as Miku holding one.

[...]

Many English speakers also refer to the spring onion Miku holds as a leek, which further adds to the confusion.

Can you give examples of what you think should be tagged as leek and what should be spring onion? Cause the miku ones are obvious leeks for me. (post #5410593, post #5304071)
The basic Y shape you mentioned looks very leek to me, they’re thick and separate into big chunks. While you can argue that it may be spring onions being grouped together, they don’t (naturally) spread into a Y shape, because they’re too soft and they’d look more like grass.

And don’t forget spring onion is also used when cut into a small circular shaped on food as decoration (post #5227323, post #5293702). Which is nothing like leeks

Fun fact: the thing Farfetch'd holds, while it's called a leek in English, is a spring onion (ながねぎ or ネギ) in Japanese. By which I mean, if merging the two is good enough for the official Pokemon translation, it's good enough for me. They look almost exactly the same, and if you ask any English speaker what Miku or Farfetch'd goes around carrying, they'll call it a leek anyway.

This looks like another instance of people supporting a BUR that will require large amounts of gardening, the BUR getting approved, then nobody bothering to garden the relevant posts. I certainly don't care enough to clean these tags up, and if nobody else does either then keeping them separate is an exercise in futility.

I do think they are distinctive enough that they could live separately if just one person wants to put in the continual maintenance to keep them separate. The question is whether anyone will.

This is getting confusing. When we say spring onion, are we expecting welsh onions? Because if so, why is scallion aliased? If we agree that welsh onion and leek look similar enough in arts then we can alias them, and leave scallion alone, where the "soft" none-Y ones (post #5402119) and the cut ones (post #5293702) I showed can go.
There's also a tag for chives ...

The bulk update request #10655 has been rejected.

remove alias scallion -> spring_onion
create alias spring_onion -> leek
remove alias spring_onion -> leek
create alias welsh_onion -> leek

As above. Abandoning the name "spring onion" completely since it can refer to several different onions. Of course if this gets approved gardening is required.

If most users don't know or care enough about the difference between two foodstuffs to put them in the correct tags, then it ultimately doesn't matter where you draw the line between those tags or what you call them, because people will just dump posts in the first tag that comes to mind anyway. The current state of the leek tag is evidence enough that nobody is actually interested in maintaining this separation. Even after a year, no one has come forward to divide up the two tags, let alone try to maintain them in the face of other users' tag misuse. It's wildly optimistic to assume that anyone's going to start doing it now.

magcolo said:

When we say spring onion, are we expecting welsh onions? Because if so, why is scallion aliased?

Per the Wikipedia link, Welsh onions are "considered to be a kind of scallion" as well. They might as well be interchangeable to the average Danbooru user. For my part, I've never even seen anything labeled as "Welsh onion" on a grocer's shelves. It's all just generic "green onions".

What I dug up on naming.

Scallions and green onions in the US are young immature form of common onions, welsh onions, and various other varieties of Allium plants, and commonly refer to the maturity of the plant at the time of harvesting which impacts their flavoring. Both scallions and green onions are young enough to still lack the development of a recognizable bulb. In other countries though they are also called a spring onion, such as in the UK apparently (BBC article called them that).

In the US a spring onion refers to an immature form of the common onion with a slight bulb. If grown longer, but not until complete maturity the bigger bulb version is called a summer onion.

The Welsh onion does not form a bulb, and though it seems some places call it a spring onion (noted a reddit post stating a Korean grocery calling them that in English), what sites I came across listing Chinese or Korean onions used in cooking tended to refer to welsh onions instead as "large scallions" or "large green onions" because of their similarity to scallions and green onions. It is recognized though that the large variety can be similar looking to leeks. Here is an example depicting from left to right a large welsh onion (site calls it a dae-pa, Korean name for it), a leek, and green onions (or scallions). Given the leek being more common in the US, likely why they get called that in translation.

magcolo said:

Can you give examples of what you think should be tagged as leek and what should be spring onion? Cause the miku ones are obvious leeks for me. (post #5410593, post #5304071)
The basic Y shape you mentioned looks very leek to me, they’re thick and separate into big chunks. While you can argue that it may be spring onions being grouped together, they don’t (naturally) spread into a Y shape, because they’re too soft and they’d look more like grass.

And don’t forget spring onion is also used when cut into a small circular shaped on food as decoration (post #5227323, post #5293702). Which is nothing like leeks

post #4468037, post #5033627, post #5372300, post #5402119, and probably post #4637025 would be what I would consider leeks. They have wide, flat leaves that look like a U shape when cut. According to the Wikipedia page, green onions, spring onions, and scallions refer to the same couple types of plant which have tubular leaves, which include welsh onions.

Artistically, the Y-shaped vegetables are depictions of some sort of spring onion, which range in shape from thin to thick, with the Y-shaped depictions looking similar to something like this. These depictions should also be assumed to be spring onions unless otherwise evidenced or stated, as spring onions are widespread in supermarkets in Japan, while leeks are of Mediterranean origin and need to be imported into Japan and are consequently rare and expensive in Japan.

Just a suggestion, but perhaps the naming should either go to "green onion" or "scallion" in general for both the regular common western scallions and the mature welsh onions. For the large welsh onions (ie Japanese "leeks") they could instead be called "large scallion" or "large green onion" and have it implicate "scallion" or "green onion" respectively. We could then have "leek_(Japanese)" or similar aliased to "large_scallion"/"large_green_onion." The base leek tag itself then should probably be deprecated, and if we do need a tag for the regular leeks then have it named "leek_(common)" or similar.

post #4468037 used as an example above for example is of a regular leek, and states that in the Japanese "リーキ."

Zumzigzoo said:

[...]

I see what you mean, they're not hard to differentiate if depicted precisely (leek vs welsh onion). That said, they're just ambiguous Ys most of the time. What makes it more confusing is that, scallion and spring onion can also refer to this, what I thought that spring onion tag is for. Sadly looks like this artist is the only one (so far) that cares to draw all three correctly. (I have to give them two thumb ups )

At this point I'm even preferring an ambiguous Y onion tag or something.

Removed non-leeks from leek. Most of the offending posts were within the past year, so I would guess someone was already gardening this at some point.

Most instances should be spring onion. I'd go as far to say taggers should assume it's a spring onion by default unless the characteristics of a leek are specifically present (i.e flat leaves as opposed to tubular, and the leaves growing in an alternating pattern as opposed to branching). Or the artist mentions that it's a leek, though this has some problems as well.

Coincidentally I learned the difference between leek and spring onions myself recently and went out of my way to find these spring onions to grow myself. Most spring onions in the West are the pencil-thin type while the larger varieties are more common in Asia. They're known as negi in Japan and dae-pa in Korea. A similar even larger variety is grown in Shandong, China. Leeks are more common in the West, and is just easier to say while "spring onion" is a mouthful so most Westerners default to saying leek. This can cause a bit of conflict when characters like Hatsune Miku or Farfetch'd are technically associated with spring onions, but English artists call them leeks instead.

As a bit of a plant nerd, I'd be more than happy gardening these tags.

luntoer said:

As a bit of a plant nerd, I'd be more than happy gardening these tags.

In this case, this BUR in unnecessary, as Talulah mentioned above. Makes more sense to have someone knowledgeable gardening the tags than writing a complex differentiation nobody will read or aliasing the 2.

The bulk update request #10642 (forum #214255) has been rejected by @Zumzigzoo.

In most cases when someone on the forums says they'll garden something to conclude a BUR, it never happens. Maybe it'll be different this time, but I wouldn't be surprised if we look back in three months and the tags are once again a mess.

Talulah said:

In most cases when someone on the forums says they'll garden something to conclude a BUR, it never happens. Maybe it'll be different this time, but I wouldn't be surprised if we look back in three months and the tags are once again a mess.

If/when that happens, someone can reopen the topic. I doubt the majority of users really cares if leek is messy and the tag is small enough to be cleaned up in 10 minutes if it ends up becoming a mess. I think the current state of the tag is good.

I don't believe these tags are really frequent enough to cause much of a mess anyway. Most of them are associated with Hatsune Miku which is basically the main reason I'm on Danbooru anyway so that shouldn't be a problem.

Well nobody has bothered to garden these tags in a month, and the absolute vast majority of spring onion is just Miku's classic leek, and this alias worked fine for years, and leek has a grand total of 8 posts, so I guess I'm just aliasing these two together again to avoid having users get confused when they search for miku + leek and find nothing where there should be thousands of posts.

The bulk update request #10642 (forum #214255) has been approved by @nonamethanks.