Gas mask tag vs Respirator tag

There is massive overlap in the visuals between the gas mask and respirator tags, and their wikis do not differentiate one from the other. If anything their wikis would suggest that they're pretty much one and the same thing (given that most gas masks are also respirators, that is true). I would like to propose we make some changes to resolve this.

Personally, I would have liked to restrict the gas mask tag to only those that protect the eyes as well (post #3943624), which is common for military gas masks. Unfortunately I'm not confident such a change would be successful given how prevalent the tag is being used for those that only cover the nose and mouth, so mistagging would be the norm.

We could alias gas mask to respirator, but I'm not sure how popular that idea would be. Unfortunately if we implicated gas mask to respirator people will probably continue to tag gas mask for both those that cover the eyes and those that don't, and that would defeat the purpose of having two tags. Aliasing gas mask to respirator is probably the approach that would be most successful with the least amount of long term maintenance.

The alternative would be aliasing respirator to gas mask, but the respirator tag is also not limited to just reusable respirators and does include disposable respirators (post #3893130). While they're different in appearance from reusable respirators, they are unique enough from other mouth masks in design to be recognizable as a respirator and so should probably be kept under the tag. Given this, I would not recommend we alias respirator to gas mask.

If we would like a tag for those that cover the eyes along with the mouth and nose, it would probably be best to create a new tag like "full-face_respirator" and start populating it from scratch.

I agree that something should be done, pretty much all the posts I have uploaded tagged with respirator (only covering the mouth and nose) there has been a random user adding gas mask which I then remove. I definitely think both versions should have a specific tag for them (ideally respirator for the smaller version and gas_mask for the full version) but I don't have a strong opinion if we should have an umbrella tag/implications as well.

Personally, I suggest setting a hard boundary between respirators and gas masks. If it has a lens it's tagged gas_mask, if it doesn't it's tagged respirator. Obviously full-face respirators are a thing, so this is a compromise option.

bagd said:
Obviously full-face respirators are a thing, so this is a compromise option.

Most full-face respirators are visually indistinguishable from gas masks. They (usually) only differ in non-visual real-world functionality.
Half-face gas masks usually come with an eye protector anyway. Or mislabelled mall ninja crap.

I agree with editing the wikis to make it clear that full-face = gas mask and half-face = respirator.

I've made changes to the wikis so that gas mask = full-face and respirator = half-face. The gas mask tag will need a lot of clean up though to remove the half-face masks.

I suspect when evaluating how things have gone in the future it will show though that tag usage will have remained the same and gas mask will still be used for both full-face and half-face masks, but that will be an issue to evaluate down the road if it doesn't change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_mask
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastomeric_respirator

Full-face versions of elastomeric respirators seal better and protect the eyes.

I think, need create additional tag.
Full-face_respirator (similar) - a single glass covering the eyes and partially covering the rest of the face.

I believe that would be unnecessary right now given that creating that as an additional tag will only further muddy up the waters and there is already a lot of mistagging going on. Two tags is currently enough.