Topic: Tag alias: Canine -> Canid

The tag alias #76934 canine -> canid is pending approval.

Reason: HEAR ME OUT.
Canid is a tag that includes canine, fantasy creatures, and a couple extinct species. Fantasy creatures are probably more frequently tagged canine- compare the page counts for pokemon canid -canine to pokemon canine. Canid -canine has very very few of the extinct species (all extant canids are canines) and a lot of hybrids, generic wolfoxdogs (which also get tagged canine), and fantasy species. Because fantasy and generic species get tagged both canid and canine there isn't much utility for this search.

And yes, this also likely applies to other family tags like felid/feline or equid/equine but before putting in the work for those I wanted to see if there'd be support for this.

FWIW in my own projects I have aliased canine to canid because I see no use for the separation, but I've also aliased many other more specific taxonomy tags in said projects

You should probably make a overall discussion thread on whether we want to maintain the traditional veterinary/genomic leaning species hierarchy we already have or propose a alternate system before throwing any individual aliases around dealing with whole valid animal kingdoms, classes, families, and realms.

Do not try skipping preparations and taking shortcuts that have the potential to literally break the site or impair search functionality given how much stuff is attached to just these 2 tags.

ryu_deacon said:
You should probably make a overall discussion thread on whether we want to maintain the traditional veterinary/genomic leaning species hierarchy we already have or propose a alternate system before throwing any individual aliases around dealing with whole valid animal kingdoms, classes, families, and realms.

Do not try skipping preparations and taking shortcuts that have the potential to literally break the site or impair search functionality given how much stuff is attached to just these 2 tags.

This IS a forum thread for the discussion of if we want to keep these sorts of tags that serve no purpose beyond reflecting real-world taxonomy.

As for breaking the site- an alias request will also move the implications. The worst that'll happen is people blacklisting 'canine' will stop seeing generic wolfoxdogs and arcanines.

ryu_deacon said:
You should probably make a overall discussion thread on whether we want to maintain the traditional veterinary/genomic leaning species hierarchy we already have or propose a alternate system before throwing any individual aliases around dealing with whole valid animal kingdoms, classes, families, and realms.

Do not try skipping preparations and taking shortcuts that have the potential to literally break the site or impair search functionality given how much stuff is attached to just these 2 tags.

A BUR should not be used here, else you'd need to remove each and every alias and implication then recreate them later

I'm iffy because not all canids are canines. Like if something is a Borophagine or Hesperocyonin, it shouldn't have the canine tag
But that is admittedly splitting hairs

nin10dope said:
I'm iffy because not all canids are canines. Like if something is a Borophagine or Hesperocyonin, it shouldn't have the canine tag
But that is admittedly splitting hairs

Yeah that's why the alias is to push everything into canid.

regsmutt said:
Yeah that's why the alias is to push everything into canid.

I'm sad there's no Philotrox characters
But there's literally no artistic imagining of it, it just has a cool name

Yeah after thinking for a bit, I'm for it. Practicality > Semantics

regsmutt said:
And yes, this also likely applies to other family tags like felid/feline or equid/equine but before putting in the work for those I wanted to see if there'd be support for this.

The situation of canid/canine is not comparable to felid/feline, since the former does not have an equivalent to pantherine splitting the umbrella in two approximately equal halves of popularity. It might be better to consider how "taxonomical" each group needs to be case by case.

gattonero2001 said:
The situation of canid/canine is not comparable to felid/feline, since the former does not have an equivalent to pantherine splitting the umbrella in two approximately equal halves of popularity. It might be better to consider how "taxonomical" each group needs to be case by case.

That's fair enough. Part of the work of making similar aliases is looking at wikis and testing different search term combinations to see if there are significant splits or differences in use.

Look guys, it's a furry website, mainly used for porn, not a biology forum.
I say, alias them.

90% of the user won't know the difference, and searching for one of the tags will hide half of the posts tagged with the other tag. It's just creating unwanted separation, imho.

EDIT: my bad, I didn't count the fact that canine implies canid. So this frammentation issue with the posts happens only when someone tags canid, instead of canine, and a user searches for canine, missing the 49k posts with only the canid tag and not the canine tag.

regsmutt said:
And yes, this also likely applies to other family tags like felid/feline or equid/equine but before putting in the work for those I wanted to see if there'd be support for this.

Same for these, yup.

I'll remind you that the obsessives who do the bulk of tagging are the same ones who are going to hate this, & I really don't see the value in this. If they're basically the same, then just search for canid, as it will always be tagged either directly or indirectly. As someone who frequently searches for both felids & felines, I'd be pretty disappointed to lose that distinction for IRL species just because fantasy creatures are tagged wrong.

aacafah said:
I'll remind you that the obsessives who do the bulk of tagging are the same ones who are going to hate this, & I really don't see the value in this. If they're basically the same, then just search for canid, as it will always be tagged either directly or indirectly. As someone who frequently searches for both felids & felines, I'd be pretty disappointed to lose that distinction for IRL species just because fantasy creatures are tagged wrong.

The main issue I have is that there's no valid use for 'canine' without a more specific species. It makes most, if not all, cases of 'canine' without a more specific tag tagged wrong.

The other issue I have is that 'canid' is a more niche term. People are more likely to default to 'canine' in both tagging and searching leading to more mistags AND incomplete searches.

regsmutt said:
The main issue I have is that there's no valid use for 'canine' without a more specific species. It makes most, if not all, cases of 'canine' without a more specific tag tagged wrong.

The other issue I have is that 'canid' is a more niche term. People are more likely to default to 'canine' in both tagging and searching leading to more mistags AND incomplete searches.

I was thinking the same thing. I could see a user not knowing what particular species is being depicted, and choosing the most generic thing they can think of (canine/canid), causing a mistag. I've probably done it accidentally before, honestly.

I'm undecided on this though, because some people do know and want to search and tag it.

The closest thing the 'canine' tag has for a use is separating out real canids from generic and fantasy canids/canid-like fictional species. In practice, due to mistags, it doesn't serve this purpose very well.

Maybe a type of tag could be made to actually serve that purpose. Like all real species imply real_canid_species. This tag is very unlikely to be mistagged.

Being a tagger of fantasy canine-like creatures using canid to tag them, I agree with the merge.
Normal people don't come here are more likely to know the word canine and try to search for it when looking for fantasy creatures that resemble them.

I think the search utility gained for these people outweighs losing a tag that is just canine (1523866 posts) plus two extinct subfamilies (30 posts).

aacafah said:
As someone who frequently searches for both felids & felines, I'd be pretty disappointed to lose that distinction for IRL species just because fantasy creatures are tagged wrong.

Fact is, since these type of tags can be easily tagged wrongly, does searching for 'felid' vs 'felines' really gives you two well distinct searches, one with fantasy creatures and the other without?

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Let's take 'canid' vs 'canine' for example:

If I TAG: canine, canis, or any specific species (wolf, dog, etc..), all tags will be correctly implicated, 'canid' too.

But if I TAG only 'canid', because the subject is for example a 'skulldog_(species)', but then I also tag 'canine_genitalia', I could intuitively tag 'canine' too.
Or I could directly just tag 'canine' even if it's a fantasy creature.

On the other hand, if I SEARCH: 'canid', all tags and creatures will be correctly implicated.

But if SEARCH only: canine, canis, or any specific species (wolf, dog, etc..), I would get:
- A mix of fantasy creatures (canid) and not fantasy creatures (canine), this because they are all miss-tagged.
- And I would miss all the posts tagged only with 'canid' even if they're not fantasy creatures (canine), also because they're miss-tagged.

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Like, the need to differentiate "real canines" from "canine-like" creatures is good to have, but 'canid', 'canine', 'felid', 'feline', etc... are very specific terms used by biologists. The usual e621 user will almost never tag them correctly.
And afaik, these tags are not used for anything else. All 'canines' all almost '
Have simpler tags like 'canid' OR 'canine' followed directly by 'wolf', 'dog', etc... it's a much simpler schema, and realistically detailed enough to differentiate furry characters.

To differentiate "real canines" from "canine-like" creatures, as suggested by @regsmutt, we could literally create a "canine-like" tag, for all creatures that are not really biologically canines.
But I bet most users would keep miss-tag 'canine' anyway, even if just those two would exists.

So, another idea: Make a disambiguation?
I'm not really an expert on how those works here on e621, but afaik, if someone uses a tag that's aliased to a disambiguation, it will be replaced by that, such to make it obvious that the used tag needs to be changed to a more specific one.
This would mean make a 'canid_(disambiguation)' and alias it to: 'canine' and 'canine-like'. OR make a 'canid_(disambiguation)' and alias it to: 'canid', 'canine' (to keep the current schema).
So that users are incentivized to change the tag to the correct specific one.

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There are also other very specific biology terms used like 'canis' or idk 'lycalopex', 'urocyon', etc... that are surely over the understanding level of the average user (neither I did know them before checking the wiki 1 minute ago). But: those are almost never tagged manually, but implicated automatically by the system. So there's no "danger" in keeping them (also because these tags are actively differentiating various species groups / sub-families between them, and are pretty useful).

'canid' and 'canine', or 'felid' and 'feline', etc... instead are those top-level tags that are fairly known, since they almost always get tagged, and consequently get manually tagged, and consequently miss-tagged. But also do not differentiate much (as said: they just differentiate real from fantasy creatures in practice, as far as I understood, right?). So they have that perfect spot or "equilibrium" of beign well known, but always miss used because "too scientific", and so don't actively differentiate much.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

Sorry to post about something unrelated, but how do you make new forum posts? I can't figure it out by looking around on this site, and when I looked it up, all I found was a post from five years ago saying how the "new" button for making new posts should be called something more obvious because they had no idea that it was for making new posts. But I can't find this "new" button anywhere.

justansalt said:
Sorry to post about something unrelated, but how do you make new forum posts? I can't figure it out by looking around on this site, and when I looked it up, all I found was a post from five years ago saying how the "new" button for making new posts should be called something more obvious because they had no idea that it was for making new posts. But I can't find this "new" button anywhere.

Top bar of the website, at the right of the "search forum" search box

raygen said:
Top bar of the website, at the right of the "search forum" search box

Ooooh! I don't know how I missed that! Thank you!

raygen said:
Like, the need to differentiate "real canines" from "canine-like" creatures is good to have, but 'canid', 'canine', 'felid', 'feline', etc... are very specific terms used by biologists.

Canine, feline, etc, are already used for fictional species. It's the more specific tags, like fox, domestic_dog (canis?), tiger, or lion that fictional species shouldn't be tagged. e.g. braixen is often tagged canine, since it is a fox-like species and fox implies canine.

I can definitely see a reason to avoid the canine/canid separation since I don't think most people really understand the distinction (including me). I do wonder how many people search canine and miss results that were only tagged canid, or how often canine gets tagged for things that should only be tagged canid. How many people search canine when they should have searched canid?

It's been said before that we aren't and shouldn't aim to be an encyclopedia for taxonomy. We should aim to have our tags reflect common understanding and utility rather than accuracy (e.g. we don't have bird imply dinosaur, which is technically accurate but people searching dinosaur aren't usually expecting birds in the results, so they're kept separate). I see it somewhat similar here. canine may technically be a distinct subgroup of canid, but people searching canine may be expecting canids as a whole, or are probably searching canid where canine would technically be more precise for their search. It's just a mess when people handle these tags directly.