WRS said:
Personally, there's a shit ton of them that need to go or a lot that can just be folded into "alternate whatever" and that tag can cover both fan made and official variations. That being said, if it's just an incredibly small change or nothing substantial, then it doesn't need to be and shouldn't become a different chartag (and that mindset is probably where the alternate whatever tags were born from). They're not that different than searching the related character and an alternate style but I don't think they're all worth removing since they give extra context via the tagging.
Believing you can just fold the tags back into "alternate whatever" and having them cover both fan-made and official variations completely ignores why the "alternate whatever" tags were created in the first place. Every alternate_* tag is implicitly about tagging unofficial/fanmade designs, and has been since alternate costume (or alternate outfit, as it was before) was created over 15 years ago, as alternate color didn't seem to care. However, the names of the tags themselves leaves little to the imagination for taggers who are not only not willing to read the tag's given wiki, but are also unfamiliar with the thing they are tagging to begin with. Whether or not a design they are tagging is official or not is the last thing they're thinking about if it is something they could care less for, they'll just see it isn't the character's standard design, slap a few alternate_* tags, and move on with their lives.
To quote evazion on recent tagging practices, "the end result [of our entire philosophy of tagging] is every tag gets twisted and diluted into the broadest, most meaningless thing possible." Think about it, what is the point of a tag which covered every time a character is depicted with a different anything from their presumed default? Imagine how meaningless that is in a world where we have to contend with characters having dozens of official alternate appearances, both major and minor, along with dozens more fan depictions doing their own thing with the characters... how are people interested only in the latter supposed to find that? It's the same shit which plagues sidelocks for instance, where it originally referred to noticeably long sidelocks, ala Patchouli Knowledge and Mizunashi Akari (hence its old tag name of payot), but after getting renamed ended up being used for any instance of sidelocks in front of someone's ears, and now if you want to search longer sidelocks, the tags for those that had been made since are severely undertagged because the users who pushed for the change didn't care to ensure those remained searchable.
That's the state of things which ultimately allowed official alternate costume to come to being, and in turn inspire the whole official_alternate_* format. To quote myself from back in 2022, "alternate costume for all intents and purposes always excluded official costumes, 'characters wearing costumes other than the ones they are typically depicted in' suggests non-canon costumes (i.e. forum #16242 and forum #41710; though for some, it only suggested non-officially-named/tagged costumes, see topic #1316 and topic #3699; and even then you had cases like topic #2487 which just tags it on official costumes). This is further compounded by enmaided implying the tag (forum #39492). It's only since 2019 that, in order to resolve the issue of folks tagging canon stuff that official alternate costume was created (topic #15975, which I then brought up in topic #17206), though a tag like it had been proposed since late 2010 (topic #7217)."
The only way to resolve something like this while maintaining the intended use of the tags is to abandon the alternate_* naming scheme entirely and changing it to something that forces taggers to think more critically about what it is they're tagging based on the tag name alone, ala the infrequent requests to turn alternate_*/official_alternate_* into unofficial_*/official_* respectively, but to quote evazion again, "as a regular user it is incredibly frustrating how established tags are constantly moved around for no good reason" (said in the context of users thinking whether v had to be changed because it seemed ambiguous). It's either that or making every alternate tag like alternate color, where the official/unofficial distinction never mattered.
