Alias artist request to unknown artist

BUR #44497 has been rejected.

create alias artist_request -> unknown_artist

I believe that because of the current name, artist request is way too often misused on posts uploaded directly from the artist's Twitter/Pixiv/etc. that just don't have an artist entry yet, so people use it to "request" for someone else to make the artist entry for them instead of making it themselves. I know that this will bring inconsistency with other *_request tags, but as it is right now this tag invites people to leave first-party source posts with the artist untagged, so this is an attempt to do something about this issue. Any possible better name suggestions welcome.

Is this really that much of an issue? If someone is a repeat offender in failing to create artist entries, gently request they do so, if they continue to fail to do so, leave a feedback. If someone uses it because they don't know how to romanize the artist's name, send them to the artist tagging help thread. If newbies occasionally do it once or twice, whatever. It's not like it's hard to create these artist entries for first-party sources, especially if it's done before bad id sets in (and if it does that's when I use SauceNao). I just don't think it would do anything to solve this apparent problem. Also to me unknown artist sounds closer to "anonymous", as in it's not a request for a tag to be added but a concession that the artist has been lost to time and doesn't need tagging.

Ylimegirl said:

Also to me unknown artist sounds closer to "anonymous", as in it's not a request for a tag to be added but a concession that the artist has been lost to time and doesn't need tagging.

Agree with this, I think the tag name artist_request encourages people to try and find the artist.

Ylimegirl said:

Is this really that much of an issue? If someone is a repeat offender in failing to create artist entries, gently request they do so, if they continue to fail to do so, leave a feedback. If someone uses it because they don't know how to romanize the artist's name, send them to the artist tagging help thread. If newbies occasionally do it once or twice, whatever. It's not like it's hard to create these artist entries for first-party sources, especially if it's done before bad id sets in (and if it does that's when I use SauceNao). I just don't think it would do anything to solve this apparent problem. Also to me unknown artist sounds closer to "anonymous", as in it's not a request for a tag to be added but a concession that the artist has been lost to time and doesn't need tagging.

IMO, the artist tag is arguably the most important tag on a post, and one of the things Danbooru is most praised for is going out of their way to almost always credit the original artists, so yes, I think it is that much of an issue. There are some first-party source posts tagged with artist request that were left without an artist tag for months. I already DM the uploaders who I see misuse artist request often, but it'd be better if there was less of a need to do so with a less confusing name. "Unknown artist" sounding like anonymous is a fair point, would something like "artist identification request" be a better name? (Saucenao hasn't been indexing any Pixiv posts posted after 2023, by the way, and most newly uploaded posts are more recent than that.)

The bulk update request #44497 (forum #372466) has been rejected by @nyom.

Whatever, IDK why I was expecting people to care that people aren't tagging artists on posts.

I do think it's important to tag artists on posts, however I do not think this alias would solve the problem and we can instead just fix the missing tags on the posts when we can, just like how we do with every other case of mistags or missing tags.

Except, when a confusing tag name causes people to mistag a lot, it's usually changed to something else to reduce the chance of a mistag happening in the first place.

The tag name isn't confusing, taggers are just lazy. If taggers currently can't be bothered to click the "create new artist entry" button when uploading a new post, even if artist request is renamed something else they'll either just use wherever the tag has been moved to or probably just won't add a tag at all.

"Unknown Artist" would make me think it's a long dead drawfag post or something like that, given how we use our other "request" tags the name makes sense and encourages other users to seek out the artist as a feasible goal. If someone is misusing the tag bring it up with a mod or leave feedback.

zetsubousensei said:

"Unknown Artist" would make me think it's a long dead drawfag post or something like that, given how we use our other "request" tags the name makes sense and encourages other users to seek out the artist as a feasible goal. If someone is misusing the tag bring it up with a mod or leave feedback.

This already has been brought up and I agreed with that point so I suggested "artist identification request" as a more clear alternative instead but no one said anything on it.

nyom said:

This already has been brought up and I agreed with that point so I suggested "artist identification request" as a more clear alternative instead but no one said anything on it.

If you proposed that instead I would give it a meh, for the reasons I stated above. I just don't think it's a tag that needs to be "fixed".

nyom said:

Whatever, IDK why I was expecting people to care that people aren't tagging artists on posts.

C'mon, nobody is saying that. You have a proposal that you think might improve the situation, others don't see it that way. Nobody is objectively correct, we're just trying to get the tagging situation as good as possible.

I agree with all the points against the alias, but I strongly disagree with the notion that people don't care about artists not being tagged on posts. I actually do there is actually a surprising number of people who care about that but just don't know the right solution to it, and that often goes with handling artist aliases/names too (people don't accept their own aliases even when they're completely obvious which is how I ended up spending a few free minutes going through the thread almost daily). Maybe part of it is being too scared that some of our more outspoken users are going to call them stupid for the way they create any type of tag, which happens a lot.

I just don't think that unknown artist is very informative - it's somewhat of a repeat of drawfag. "Request" metatags have come to mean very much asking for help identifying whatever it is the request is. I'd sooner be worried about non-official art posts lacking an artist tag and not being tagged with artist request (arttags:0 exists but the average lurker isn't using that) than with its current name personally.

Out of curiosity, I decided to see how often people aren't tagging artist request in the first place via arttags:0 -official_art -artist_request -status:deleted and the search request tends to time out for getting a total count so that's already a good sign. When it doesn't it gives me over 18k results, with quite a few of them being uploaded within the last week. Suffice to say my second point of lazy uploaders not bothering to add a tag at all is already a reality, and one that wouldn't be fixed by changing the tag. I would much prefer lazy uploaders use artist request in comparison to having to use that behemoth of a search to find uncredited art, especially since it means blue users can't help with fixing those edge cases above, while they absolutely can with artist request.

More specifically I think my final query would be something like arttags:0 -artist_request -status:deleted -(official_art or screenshot or game_cg or game_screenshot or anime_screenshot), and then maybe plus or minus a non-web source to sort out the easier fixes from the hard ones.

nyom said:

IMO, the artist tag is arguably the most important tag on a post, and one of the things Danbooru is most praised for is going out of their way to almost always credit the original artists

Totally agree with this statement, but exactly because of that: Seeing a post without a red tag stands out to me immediately, subconsciously even. When I come across such a post, I'll more often than not expend at least a little effort to find the post's artist. Having an artist tag for posts that lack a real one breaks that cognitive path.

You get a warning on upload if you omit an artist tag, so if a user is going to ignore that, it's the user that needs dealing with. The warning doesn't show if you add artist_request so if people misunderstand that tag and add it where they shouldn't, there could be value in renaming it, but it should stay a meta tag, not an artist tag.