Standard tag proposals · 6:59pm Jun 7th, 2015
We're gonna tag blog posts now. But if you want posts about Pinkie, you don't want to search #pinkie, #Pinkie, #pinkie_pie, #pinkie pie, #Pinkie Pie, #pinkie-pie, #pinky, #pinkiepie, and #pinky_pie. I propose standards. What do you think of these?
lowercase
#luna, not #Luna
Doesn't matter; knighty fixed it.
Use present tense instead of past
#suck not #sucked
With exceptions for idiomatic phrases: #I came, not #I come.
Avoid dashes
#writeoff, #postmodern not #write-off, #post-modern
Avoid uncommon parts of speech
#postmodern, not #postmodernism
#recommend, not #recommendation?
Should we stem all words, like #writing => #write? I don't think we can make that stick, so probably not.
No_underscores
We can use spaces. No #pinkie_pie, please.
Avoid plurals for words used in both singular and plural
#review, #recommendation, not #reviews, #recommendations
Because it's less awkward to use the singular when you have more than one than to use the plural when you have just one.
Exception: Tags that will almost only be talked about in the plural form, or that have a memetic gestalt in the plural. Like #spoilers, #bronies, #superheroes, or the #tags tag on this article.
Use #spoilers if you have spoilers, #nospoilers if you have no spoilers
Then we can filter out blogs with spoilers, however the filter works.
Character names
I suggest
#celestia #luna #twilight #applejack #fluttershy #rarity #pinkie #rainbow #big mac #derpy
Because I don't wanna type "#twilight sparkle" over and over. Nor "#princess celestia". #twilight velvet makes sense. All other characters can get the long form, e.g., #berry punch.
Please, no #applebloomor #sweetie bell.
Okay, here's where we roll up our sleeves and fight:
#cadence
Because that is a word and non-painful to look at and is pronounced like the name is pronounced in the show. For further info:It appears that different parts (such as Facebook, or official websites, etc.) of The Hub and Hasbro seem to be spelling it differently. From what I can see, official sources (such as Jayson / McCarthy; the script for the episode; that little event Hasbro held in Dec. 2011 that gave us the first glance at the “royal wedding” and Cadence) seem to use “Cadence”, while all the toys except the blindbags seem to use “Cadance”, along with The Hub's website and facebook page.
One guess is that there was a disconnect somewhere within the companies, thus different parts of The Hub / Hasbro using different spellings. But still, all show-canon information is pointing towards “Cadence”. Both the pronunciation and the full name are pointing to “Cadence”.
OR, judging from the fact that the majority of the toys have “Cadance”, it could also be that “Cadance” was easier to trademark than “Cadence”, due to “Cadance” not being a real word and all, so they don't have to deal with other trademarks containing “Cadence”.
Don't let the Hasbro toy division win. If it were up to them, Celestia would be pink.
yes I know the micro-comics say Cadance but they are wrong, dammit
I suppose I can't propose the usual "Cadænce" compromise on this one...
Well, I prefer e over a anyway.
In any case, this looks good to me.
I didn't know we could use spaces.
I revert to #pinkie pie, then.
Are the tags actually case-sensitive?
Not sure I understand this example. If I want to blog about modernism, I'll... well, I'll tag it #philosophy and end it there, but still.
Anyway, I'm not convinced this conversation is actually going to matter. What I imagine will happen is that two or three dozen savvy bloggers looking more for views than accuracy will shotgun any tags that might possibly be related, to cast as wide a net as possible, and everyone else will go about their lives using their own preferred systems until an organic consensus emerges from the chaos and people gradually converge on that.
In terms of Cad<a/e>nce, the site uses Cadance for its tagging, as does the wikia. I think you should probably just give in.
Edit: I mean, assuming you want people to actually find your tagged posts.
I reject your standards just on general principle. If I made stuff easy to find, nopony would read any of it. It's when they accidentally click on stuff that I get views.
3130072 We've seen pony tagging systems before, on ponibooru and derpibooru. There's never convergence. Just chaos and tag-shotgunning.
3130080 <Sigh>. You're right. Though the wikia was built by crazy fans who love toys more than fan-fiction.
I'm not hopelessly stubborn. I did just admit Cadence exists.
I think this would be improved with a noun-over-verb rule, rather than an uncommon-parts-of-speech rule. To me, #recommendation and #writing both feel more natural than #recommend and #write, based on usage. #postmodern vs. #postmodernism is a noun vs. adjective situation, and I don't really have a horse in that race (though I do think I continue to prefer the noun forms to other forms—but the preference is very slight).
Anyway, I guess I'm going to have to go tag my blogs pretty soon. I'm willing to hold off a couple days, though, to see if some sort of consensus develops around tagging.
You had me up until Cadance. Otherwise, good ideas all round.
To start with, do we know how the search system works (or will ultimately work)? For example, skimming the comments on the announcement post, it looks like some tag searches will grab related tags, but not all will. That'd have an impact on what standards should be used.
Opinions on specific points here:
I'd really prefer capitals for character/story/etc names, if nothing else - it looks a lot better, and they're not in dispute like the examples you gave. I could see going lowercase on other stuff, but that'd depend on how the search system works: if you can, say, do both case insensitive and sensitive searches, there wouldn't be any need to constrict it.
Reasonable enough, but the specifics will depend on which searches return related tags versus just the tag directly searched.
Probably prudent.
Please make it so.
Seems like this might not be necessary, though I don't know how the system handles irregular plurals. Those might need to be singular, and I could see going all singular for consistency.
I'd say go with full (and correctly spelled) names for everyone, to reduce the chance of cross-search contamination. Not sure about titles, but they'd probably be a good idea. Still pushing for capitals, obviously.
I'd prefer #Cadance, since I like the extra implications of blending "dance" in. In my mind it kinda changes the meaning to "song of joy", which seems appropriate.
3130130
pre08.deviantart.net/75f8/th/pre/i/2015/157/0/c/i_win__by_gray__day-d8w9ave.png
I'm never gonna call her Cadance, no matter what the wiki of Hasbro or Fimfiction says. From a British-English POV, spelling it Cadance gives the impression it's pronounced "K-daans" [1]. Which is dumb.
Either way, yes. I don't have any opinion about the specifics, but I agree that standardised tags should be a thing. I think Knighty oughta take steps toward this, too - a button to add a specific character's tag, and the same for episodes, genres etc etc.
[1] Phonetics are hard, man.
3130264
Ok, gotta ask: what is "daans" supposed to represent? I'd assume dance, if I hadn't seen "aa" used for pretty much every possible sound "a" can make at some point or other.
Anyway, I usually just think of "Cadance" as "K" + "dance", which I at least think sounds fine. Close enough to "K" + "dence", and as described in my earlier post (3130228) I like the meaning more.
Definitely agreed on hoping we get preset tag choices, though I'm not sure how many ought to be added. If there're too many, it ends up being easier to just type it in directly instead of trying to find the ones you're after, which would be kinda self-defeating.
3130228
There's a comment on knighty's post replying to Titanium Dragon where he explains why a search for #review will find #reviews, but not vice-versa, and why that won't change. He didn't mention irregulars.
If the system had aliasing, it wouldn't need to go Pinkie vs Pinkie Pie.
For what it is worth, on Derpibooru, they use the characters' full names IIRC.
3130301
'Tis in fact the comment I left my "research" tab open on. Unfortunately, since I don't know the details of either the tag reduction scheme or the search system, it didn't exactly help much with the irregular plurals issue.
3130299
"Daans" was my attempt at phonetically spelling the British pronunciation of "dance". As I said, phonetics are hard.
I'd like to see preset tags for all characters, at the very least. Other tags should ideally be suggested based on "heat", and maybe suggested while you type.
3130263 and I both spell it with an A and you can't stop it. I find it funny that this blog post has devolved into arguing about heart butt.
3130130
Why are tags case sensitive anyway?
I've generally used capital letters on titles of games, characters, and stories.
[edit]
They aren't. Any actual tag search url has them fully lower case.
It seems the system ignores colons, which is a pity, because I've been tagging my fics in my blogs with the format "fic:Flitter" to differentiate from the MLP character Flitter. However, the actual tag search just becomes "ficflitter".
On the FoE thing... people should just not abbreviate that, dammit
. But the aforementioned fact about colons does make it even more annoying to differentiate, yes.
In commiseration, should we tag #chrysalis as #falsecadence for you? Just so you've got something.
Your reference is from 2012.
S4E11 Three's A Crowd (Jan 2014) had the spelling "Cadance" in the credits.
3130437 The tags are now case-insensitive. They were case-sensitive when I wrote this post. I think knighty had just written the code to lowercase the search target, but not the code to lowercase the search term.
3130707
I see. The colon ignore thing is still annoying, though
3130707
Ooh. Looks like colons work too now
Yeah, see, I ran into exactly this problem when coming up with naming conventions for discrepancy reports.
This is what happens when you delegate all your clerical tasks to search engines.
troll-face.ru/static/mememaker/0/1/7479-bender-s-sigaroy.jpg
" 'Pedagogic images'...'pedophilic images'...eh, close enough."
How do you feel about 'Fleur Dis Lee'?
Can we fight about #fleur dis lee too? :V Because I wanna punch some dudes over that one.
3131065
DAMMIT NEMRYN
Bad Horse, this is a laudable goal, but I suspect you may be undertaking a Sisyphean task. My experience in this sort of thing, admittedly anecdotal, is that either tagging conventions emerge organically out of fan consensus, as Honeycomb suggested (AO3 is actually extremely reliable in this regard with a fandom of any size on it) or you simply wallow in chaos and tag shotgunning forever. Although tag shotgunning is a kind of consensus, in a way.
That said, your willingness to undertake the struggle is noble in a "doomed Greek hero" sort of way.
Yes, yes we will. I will goddamn defend that second A with all the fervor of a drunken 19th century British aristocrat whose honor has been slighted.
3131115
I would bet $5 that that one's a typo which showed up on official material somehow, and is now self-perpetuating.
The one true tag for the pink princess: #(Princess )?(Cad[ae]nce|Mi Amore Cadenza)
(now we have two problems)
Moving on. What we really need is a good set of aliases and implications, I think. And case-insensitive tags. If we can alias pinkie and "pinkie pie" and pinkiepie together, and have pinkamena imply one of those, Pinkie will be easily findable. Same for twilight sparkle, twilight (sorry Mrs. Velvet, but you're not nearly popular enough to get that one), and maybe twi/twily/twiley. For sunbutt, moonbutt, and candybutt, "princess X" could be aliased to X. "princess twilight" should probably imply twilight instead of being aliased. Well thought out aliases and implications go a long way to making tags "just work".
All of this makes perfect sense, and in fact I wish there were some built in tools to support this kind of standardization.
That said, I also have a strange desire to give each of my blog posts a random tag that's been hashed in SHA-512
#f053fb65c36e899b0f317dc8a21c8a1bb0f522b4df8bada40357cfca0255a828c546ab8ad9f94a8ba5d3f5f90da815510065f35776ba896496717528195a43e2
3131343
I don't think we see quite eye-to-eye here.
3131115 It's the damn wikia.com page again. They need to stop taking typos printed on toys by Hasbro's idiot toy division as canon.
Maybe we should wage wiki war over it.
3131343 But REAL engineers use reverse polish notation.
#sparkle twilight
Or we should use Army-style:
#Sparkle, Twilight, one
I like having a tag inheritance hierarchy! So #alicorn picks up #luna, #celestia, and #twilight.
3130621
They probably copied it from wikia.com.
3132760
Y'know, I'd be perfectly happy with the latter, no fooling.
The whole Cadance vs Cadence thing reminds me of the "See-zer" vs "Kai-sar" thing.
Still not sure how the diphthong "ae" is mistaken to sound like either a long "e" or the diphthong "ai".
Really not sure how the "sar" in Caesar turned into a "zer."
3146675
This is a thing I'm unfamiliar with. Is the German 'Kaiser' derived from 'Caesar'? How about the Russian 'Tsar'?
3147313
Yes to both.