Modern Armor and Protective Equipment and Huge Shield

I've been running into hurdles when tagging images of people wearing heavy modern protective gear. The set of tags is quite sparse, hard to find, and restrictively specific.

Before we start

This isn't a formal proposal, just a start to a discussion. I would like for this to lead to something resembling a consensus, so a concrete proposal can be forged.

I'm also more than happy to put in quite some grunt work to help make these changes happen. I'm not expecting this to just happen magically.

The issue

Tags for modern protective equipment (both military and civilian) suffer from a couple of problems:
1. There is no comprehensive list
2. Lack of umbrella terms and multiple tags for things that are hard to distinguish in artworks
4. insufficient wiki cross-linking between tags
5. a lack of aliases for common alternative names

Comprehensive List

There is a list of armor, but it's quite lacking in the 'modern' department, and there's plenty of stuff that qualifies as 'protective', but not as armor. What are your thoughts on something like a tag_group:protective_equipment that would cover anything from surgical masks and rubber gloves to power armor and bucklers?

Umbrella Terms

It's often impossible to tell whether something is a bulletproof, load bearing, or molle vest in an artwork. And personally, I don't think it's vital to differentiate between them at all, yet they all have a tag, plus the body armor tag. Similarly riot shield is too specific of a term, and while the wiki makes it clear it's to be used not just for shields that police use at riots, it leads to confusion.

Ongoing Changes: riot shield has just been split into riot shield and ballistic shield. I'd prefer uniting them under a more general tag; input on this is welcome.

Cross-linking

It's quite difficult to find many of these tags, as almost nothing links to them. The solution is straight forward: add the relevant links. This will be a non-issue to solve once all these tags are gathered somewhere

aliases

Self explanatory. Makes it easier to find these tags.

Ideas for changes

Just an outline. Specific tag changes are summarized at the end of the section.

• Create tag_group:protective_equipment
• We don't need 4 tags for something that looks roughly the same 90% of the time. My suggestion is to consolidate load baring vest, body armor, bulletproof vest, molle vest under the "tactical vest" umbrella term, and reduce them each to an alias.
• Rename riot shield to "tactical shield" to remove tagging ambiguity and make an alias. Possibly create a "riot gear" and "police/riot helmet" tag to complement it.
• Currently there's no tags to describe that a shield is comparatively or exceptionally large. In the same lane as the huge weapon tag, I think a "huge shield" tag would be useful for describing shield that are at least as big as the person wielding it. Similarly an intermediate "tower shield" tag for large but not huge shields would be nice. Lastly I was thinking about a "makeshift shield". These three additions would would help a lot when searching for characters that use shields. I'm honestly surprised that these tags don't exist considering the overly specific tags there are for armor pieces.
• create 'assault helmet' for heavy modern helmets like you'd wear with a blast suit or the one Tachanka wears.
• Make some more sensible aliases (listed later)

Summary

• rename
• bulletproof vest --> tactical vest umbrella term
• riot shield --> tactical shield to make the inclusion of non-riot related bulletproof shields more obvious
• new
• riot gear as complement to tactical shield where appropriate; no implication in either direction
• riot/police helmet helmet with transparent face shield
• tower shield for shields that can cover most or all of the body
• huge shield like [huge weapon]; at least as large as the character wielding it
• makeshift shield crudely assembled shield; think "(car )door" or "sheet metal fence" used as a shield
• assault helmet think Tachanka
• deletion
• load_baring_vest,

body_armor,
bulletproof vest,
molle vest covered by tactical vest

• alias
• molle vest,

bulletproof vest,
stab vest,
load_baring_vest,
ballistic vest --> tactical vest make clear this is an umbrella term

• ballistic helmet --> military helmet common term
• blast suit --> bomb suit common term
• riot shield --> tactical shield make clear this is an umbrella term
• implication
• tower shield

huge shield --> shield

List of tags

This section is just a (non exhaustive) listing of various tags relevant to this topic so they are easily referenced. Will be expanded as necessary.

Other protective equipment

• todo

SlickKilmister said:

I'm honestly surprised that these tags don't exist considering the overly specific tags there are for armor pieces.

I don't think this is entirely too surprising, mainly for one reason - you're more likely to find non-tactical, pre-modern style armor in art and anime than you are tactical armor. If I remember correctly, most if not nearly all of the armor piece tags are of more 'traditional' armor; in that same vein, you're also more likely to find non-tactical, military-style armor in art and anime as well, whether they be futuristic, early Cold War, WW2, WW1, etc. At the very least, that's the impression I get.

Otherwise, solid suggestions, Slick, at least in my opinion. If you haven't done so already, it might be worth combing through relevant copyright tags (GFL, R6S, CS, the Division, etc.) to a) see if there's any more obscure tags you haven't found linked already in wikis relevant to this discussion; and b) identify what else may be worthwhile tagging that hasn't been covered already.

SlickKilmister said:

I'm honestly surprised that these tags don't exist considering the overly specific tags there are for armor pieces.

Damian0358 said:

you're more likely to find non-tactical, pre-modern style armor in art and anime than you are tactical armor.

My sentence there was referring only to "tower", "huge" and "makeshift" shield tags. That's why I invoked the comparison to the armor tags, cause they are (mostly) medieval/fantasy as well. I was especially surprised by the absence of "huge shield", because there are a couple very popular characters that wield a comically oversized shield.

Otherwise, solid suggestions, Slick, at least in my opinion. If you haven't done so already, it might be worth combing through relevant copyright tags (GFL, R6S, CS, the Division, etc.) to a) see if there's any more obscure tags you haven't found linked already in wikis relevant to this discussion; and b) identify what else may be worthwhile tagging that hasn't been covered already.

I haven't weeded through copyrights much yet, but sounds like a good idea. I have a few more potential tags in my notes, but I don't wanna go overboard with making new tags, so I tried to limit myself as much as I could. For example "thigh guards" (as complement to shin and arm guards) are relatively common im modern and dystopian themes. Or in the non-armor category I was thinking about making a clearer distinction between a handheld welding shield and a worn welding mask/helmet. I haven't really gotten into the non-combat related gear or gear-related activities yet, and I fear it's gonna be a major task to map out, but I think a broader tag group including it is gonna be much more valuable than just a list of armor stuff.

• added a simple prefix system to the tag list to easily describe proposed tag changes.
• added index for protective equipment of head, eyes and ears.
• chose "assault helmet" to describe tachanka-like helmets.
• external sorted all the hats in tag_group:headwear by whether they have brims, visors or are brimless while I was at it, cause that's been bugging me for a while.

I just discovered that @NWF_Renim just created ballistic shield and cleaned up riot shield (I now reflected the change in my listing).
I'd still say there isn't much need two separate tags for this, as combined they have just over 300 images. I think aliasing may be more practical:
alias ballistic shield & riot shield -> 'tactical shield'

But this isn't that important, both ways are ok with me.

• greatly increased detail of list for head
• modified prefix system

• added list for hands, and sole entry for fingers