RaisinBread said:
currently there's no difference between cowboy and cowboy western
The difference is, cowboy is for characters dressed as cowboys. Cowboy_western is for images themed around the Wild West in general, regardless of how anyone is dressed. There are plenty of cowboy_western images without any cowboys in them, e.g. post #2460324, post #3412057, post #4635865, or post #4786878.
the wiki for cowboy western makes it sound like cowboy should be for males only while in use it's used for both genders and doesn't mention its for males only in its own wiki.
That's just an artifact from the outdated males-only restriction in the cowboy tag. It was a dumb, arbitrary rule that existed only because a decade ago some users were stuck on the idea that cowboy is a gendered term and that it was "incorrect" to tag stuff like post #967930 as a cowboy. Fortunately, the majority of users today are evidently a lot more open-minded, as despite the past efforts of a few people to enforce this rule, a full third of the tag is presently female characters. Which is how it should be, because we don't need multiple gendered tags for what is essentially the same costume. A male-only cowboy tag is just as pointless as the old stewardess and kunoichi tags.
If anything must be done to make this more clear, my suggestion is to rename the tag to cowboy_outfit or cowboy_costume to emphasize the fact that we're tagging the clothes, not the profession.
using cowboy_(female) and cowboy_(male) avoids confusion with the cow boy and cow girl tags.
We shouldn't be concerned about anyone confusing cowboy with cow_boy. The only time this ever happened was with a self-uploader who used plenty of other wrong tags as well. Usually when someone misuses the cowboy tag, it's because they actually meant to use cowboy_shot.
