Tag Alias: morningstar -> flail

Reason: Both medieval weapons are very similar except that the morningstar has a spiked ball.

I think you meant mace instead of flail. We currently differentiate between those with a chain and those without a chain. Those with a chain or hinge would fall under flail, those without currently should fall under mace.

It might be worthwhile to keep the morning_star tag, I think the weapons do typically look fairly different. The negative of having them completely separate is that currently the majority of images under the mace tag would fall under the morning_star tag.

I'm conflicted on this issue. On one hand I think it would be best to have everything tagged as completely and accurately as possible. So all spiked weapons (of these under discussion) get morning_star regardless of articulation, and then articulation is additionally tagged via mace or flail. The problem with following this logic is that he tag lists start to become very long and complicated with multiple tags for each object in the image.

I came across a similar situation recently with anti-materiel_rifle. By the wiki definition every anti-materiel_rifle is also a sniper_rifle and from there it is also a rifle and also a gun, and also a weapon.

I almost requested (and would support) an implication from anti-materiel_rifle → sniper_rifle, but held back when I realized that meant that every anti-materiel_rifle would then be responsible for adding 5 tags all by itself.

This issue would be best handled via tag ontologies as I described in the Danbooru 2 thread (forum #34926). Short of major Danbooru alterations like that though, I think I would support for full (even if redundant) tagging, but with some reservations as noted above.

Too much information is better for searching, indexing, and uniquely identifying than too little.

I don't think there is much complications between the 3 weapons. We use flail for those with a hinge or chain, those without a hinge or chain then can be either a morning_star or a mace. To determine which goes under which, we just check to see if it has spikes or bumps/flanges. Spikes for morning_stars and then mace for those without.

If you look at Flail's Wikipedia article though, note the fact that a hinged/chained weapon can also be a moring_star provided it's spiked, (Kettenmorgenstern in German).

I'm not quite following you. A flail is not a mace, and it is not a morning star. A morning star is a club-like weapon with a spiked end, a mace has no spikes, and a flail is a weapon with a chained weighted end that could either be spiked or not spiked. Having or not having spikes was never a determining factor in whether the weapon was a flail, a flail is flail because of the hinge/chain. A morning star does not have a chain, as it is a club-like weapon.

The names have sometimes been used interchangeably, but they can truly be separated without any overlap and a proper definition so it is a non-issue.

Also just because some names for the weapon can contain the name of another weapon, does not mean that we need to make it a subcategory of the other.

I think what's being said is:
Does it have spikes? Y/N
If Y, it is a morningstar.

Is it a chained or hinged implement? Y/N
If Y, it is a flail.
If N, it is a mace.

Therefore, one could have a morningstar mace just as easily as one could have a morningstar flail.

I understand now, we were drawing a line at different aspects. The way I see it morning_star/mace = direct shaft to head connection, flail = chain/hinge between shaft and head.

I understand that your way would enables more detailed searches, I think it'll likely be unnecessary. While the flail and morning_star tags are fairly under tagged, I believe we can still draw some assumptions looking at the mace and flail tags. 1) Mace weapons are going to be much rarer than morning_stars and 2) nearly all (if not all) flail images are going to be the spiked kind.

Looking through the weapons tag, I'd actually be less inclined to want to use mace/morning_star in conjunction with flail, as the use of those to differentiate between spikes and no-spikes would then just as likely to apply to ball_and_chain... and would make things even more confusing. It'd be much easier for the tagging process and in general finding what you want if we simply leave flail as an independent weapon separate from morning_star/mace.

On a related note, this image post #264482 and it's wonderful mace on one end, flail with spiked ball on the other. Do we have a tag for two-sided weapons?

I think it depends on how one defines the weapons. In my mind a morning star essentially is a spiked mace, and looks more similar to a spiked flail than an unspiked flail does. For visual similarity purposes it feels right to have a tag to combine the spiked weapons.

That may or may not be technically by the book as far as the dictionary definition writer is concerned, but the semantic similarities are obvious and judging from the Kettenmorgenstern flail I noted above, doesn't seem to have been too much of a issue for the people who actually named and used the weapons.

If there is a need for a spiked weapon tag, it should probably be that, and not that of an already existing weapon. As has been noted, a morning star is a staff weapon with a spiked head (Look in the wiki for morning star and it specifies that a Kettenmorgenstern is technically a military flail). To such, you would also have to add much of ball and chain, spiked_club and possibly kanabo. I don't think there is such a need, however, just as there's no need for bladed weapon (to account for both swords and halberds).

My point with Kettenmorgenstern was that it is a spiked flail, but named "morgenstern" = "morning star", which means someone in history did consider the term "morning star" to include spiked flails.

If we want to go by strict prescriptive definitions, I don't have a problem with it, things will likely need cleaned up though. And a morningstar → flail alias / implication is flat out wrong then.

there is also meteor_hammer

The two images under meteor_hammer are likely better off moved to ball_and_chain, though I think that tag needs to be split between the restraint and the weapon.

I guess a big question is how do we want to use flail, do we want to use it as a specific weapon or do we want to use it as a category of weapons. Much like how polearm defines the handle of the weapon more so than the head of the weapon. If we use it the way you propose Shinji, it's really not that much of an additional step to use it to categorize any flail-type weapon (weapons such as the nunchaku, three_section_staff are also used in a similar manner) and use other weapon tags to define the other characteristics of the weapon.

If we want a flail_weapon tag pretty much, then we might also want a tag like chain_weapon to refer to weapons that use a particular long chain in it. We do have weapons that rely on a particular long chain, longer than what would be used for a flail type weapon.

This gets back into the ontology thing again. With a working ontology system we could have flail_weapon and chain_weapon entries with the specific weapon names as specific hyponyms under them.

We also could do this with implication chains or manual maintenance. I can see benefits and drawbacks to doing this. On the pro side it allows for richer tag searches, categorization, and description; on the con side it clutters the tag list and might be hard to keep in order without a richer underlying mechanism.

In this specific instance, I don't have a strong opinion either way. I guess I started this thread with a different internal definition (which I still think is valid) than the strict "morningstar is and only is a rigid mace-like weapon with spikes" prescriptive definition. I can see the benefit to keeping a strict definition to maintain a single tag for a specific weapon type though (rather than needing two tags to describe it).