Aliasing artists

So, what is the proper way to alias artists? We have two mechanisms, artist aliases and tag aliases, and it seems that unlike tag aliases, artist aliases do not cause posts associated with one to show up in the results for the other. What is the use case for such kind of disjoint aliasing?

As to my particular case, we have takehito_shingetu, which should be properly spelt "shingetsu". Which type of alias should be used for that?

I'd say both. Set up the artist alias and submit a corresponding tag alias.

I think artist-aliases are mostly for covering alternative names when searching through the artist directory, not for spelling alterations. Like, if I find a new blog I try to find the artist's real name, and if I do I usually put the kanji/kana version as an alias, and sometimes the nickname they use as well. That way if someone else also finds the blog and tries to add the artist to the database, the chance is high that they will find my entry and we won't have to go and merge two tags that represent one artist.

Like, for example, hamamoto_ryuusuke. I put up his kanji name (濱元隆輔) and his nickname on pixiv (ryu_moto) as artist aliases. But I don't think it's necessary to make them into full-blown aliases since there are no ryu_moto tags (or 濱元隆輔).

And conversely I wouldn't want to put up an artist alias for hamamoto_ryusuke, either. If people start tagging art with that incorrectly, it's just time to suggest a "proper" alias for that.

EDIT: ... Yeahhh. I didn't actually search for hamamoto_ryusuke when writing that post. /mass-tag edit

surasshu said:
I think artist-aliases are mostly for covering alternative names when searching through the artist directory, not for spelling alterations.

Bingo. The aliases field in the artist database is, as far as I know, purely for searching the artist database. And I have used it as such, plugging in kanji to see if an artist entry already existed under a different romanization than I was expecting.

If you want a true alias, you go to /tag_alias/add. They are not and are not meant to be the same thing, and I think there's good reason for that. The main use for me is putting in the Japanese kana/kanji. And that can be the same for multiple artists, which tags cannot - hence the _(qualifier) additions.

So yeah, they aren't and shouldn't be the same thing, thuogh perhaps having the word 'alias' in both places is confusing?