Resolving the girl DC superhero costume tags

BUR #45027 has been rejected.

In 2024, user @mock attempted to get the ball rolling on DC superhero costume tags, beginning first with Batgirl, Catwoman, and Harley Quinn, then topic #27950, then Supergirl, Starfire, Huntress, Power Girl and Red Hood. The first time this was brought up on-site publicly was me calling them out on it after they made 13 costume tags for Padme Amidala, a character that at the time only had 82 posts, and tried to get them implied in forum #312105.

At the time, I expressed that, in contrast to the Padme tags, one could at least see where mock was coming from with the DC costume tags;

Damian0358 said:

...mainly once you look at how Western comics tagging interacts with our usual tagging policy. For a ton of these costumes, the usual thing to say would be "use copyright tags instead," but the way Western comics are tagged on Danbooru makes that a difficult issue. We generally don't have copyright tags dedicated to a specific comic book run, period/era, or author/artist, with only the most noteworthy of instances (or official art) inspiring such tags, so principally there wouldn't be a way to search up variants of costumes like, say, those of Catwoman.

But that runs up to a parallel problem, in that you can't reliably use comic runs or comic periods/eras for tagging these because there's a good chance a design transcends a specific run or period unless said design is inextricibly tied to either (and this can even apply to comic adaptations, depending on the title), you can't reliably use authors/artists because of the nature of Western comics and how a given run could be drawn by multiple artists, and our usual method of official names or nicknames falls flat here because it's unlikely that every version of a given character has one of these (which basically leaves the year of the design's debut as your only option unless you want to go ultra-descriptive in the qualifier, which isn't intuitive to those not in the know).

So I'm personally actually really mixed about those costume tags, because we don't have a good solution for making them searchable otherwise, and this isn't even getting into the fact that you could technically call precedent with the few Spider-Man variant tags we have, even if I'd counterargue that those are a different ballpark from what's being asked of here.

The points I raised remain present, but at the same time, I realized that we never had a real discussion about these tags because mock never once thought to bring it to discussion, in the same way Knowledge Seeker brought KalpacMuskoxen's Mario costume tags to discussion in topic #32523 (where I've expressed my opinion on the costume tagging trend via forum #370051, same elsewhere with forum #350721), or how, on the heels of forum #337450, Fenton was convinced to make a proposal for ONE PIECE costume chartags in topic #31153, because that's how you do things as opposed to just making them.

So I made this thread, with the initial BUR proposing we nuke all of these tags. If we decide to nuke them all, if we decide to keep some of them (most likely Harley Quinn (Classic) and Harley Quinn (Suicide Squad)), if we decide to keep them in some fashion (perhaps something along the lines of topic #27950, giving at least the separate Batgirls et al their own chartags, opening the door for similar with the lads per forum #307597), if we decide to keep them all as chartags and deal with the implications and consequences that would entail, etc. we decide that here. Out of courtesy, I've pinged mock to allow them to make their case for their existence.

I'm not very knowledgeable on all of these different depictions, but if nothing else if the wiki says something like, Almost identical to this other costume then at least one of those tags doesn't need to exist. Some sort of consolidation needs to happen here, at the very least.

This bulk update request is pending automatic rejection in 5 days.

This bulk update request has been rejected because it was not approved within 45 days.

The bulk update request #45027 (forum #374444) has been rejected by @DanbooruBot.

Was asked for comment:

I can't really comment on the appropriateness of most of the individual tags, I certainly don't know every Batgirl outfit; I think some, like blindVigil noticed are very close together in appearance and seem to be difficult to tag for people who aren't experts on this specific subject.

I think there's some value for instances like post #9860471 (cosplay) and strong value for outfits appearing across different copyrights (Harley Quinn (Classic), frequently), so I don't think the exact BUR here would be a good idea (especially in the case of the HQ tags as stated in the OP).

Copyright tagging would be a solution for some of these but considering users' propensity to tag the origin of a character in every post containing that character and the appearance of outfits across multiple copyright tags I think it would be difficult to get under control (and some examples of such issues already exist)