<p>Whenever many people contribute to a single project, a rough schema is useful to keep everyone on roughly the same track. It is not important for it to be upheld absolutely; it will just make searches easier if most of us can mostly agree to some guidelines.</p>
<p>The most important thing is: <b>if your tag idea is your opinion, don't add it to my repo</b>. I only want objective tags, not subjective. 'beautiful' is unhelpful since no one can agree on what it means. 'lingerie', 'blue eyes', and 'male' or 'female' are better since reasonable people can generally agree on what they mean. If someone thinks blue-eyed women are beautiful, they can search for that to find beautiful things. Other people can use different terms to find what they want.</p>
<p>As with all rulesets, it is very possible to go too far. We will never be able to easily and perfectly categorise every single image to everyone's satisfaction, so there is no point defining every possible rule for every possible situation. This is especially true for namespaces. So lower any autismal expectations you might have and just start tagging. Fixing mistakes is not difficult.</p>
<h3>you can add pretty much whatever the hell you want, but don't screw around</h3>
<p>You can't prefix a tag with a '-' or 'system:' for obvious reasons, but tag repositories will accept anything else utf-8. You can start your own namespaces, categorisation systems, whatever. Just be aware that everyone else will see what you do.</p>
<p>Of course, if you are tagging a picture of someone holding a sign that says 'beautiful', then you can go ahead and tag it that. Otherwise, please keep it to yourself!</p>
<p>Numbers should be written '22', '1457 ce', and 'page:3', unless as part of an official title like 'ocean's eleven'. When the client parses numbers, it does so intelligently, so just use '1' where you might before have done '01' or '001'. I know it looks ugly sometimes to have '2 girls' or '1 cup', but the rules for writing numbers out in full are hazy for special cases.</p>
<p>Nouns should generally be singular, not plural. 'chair' instead of 'chairs', 'cat' instead of 'cats', even if there are several of the thing in the image. If there really are <i>many</i> of the thing in the image, add a seperate 'multiple', 'comparison' or 'group' tag as apppropriate.</p>
<p>Ignore this when the thing is normally said in its plural (usually paired) form. Say 'blue eyes', not 'blue eye'; 'breasts', not 'breast', even if only one is pictured.</p>
<h3>acronyms and synonyms</h3>
<p>I prefer the full 'series:the lord of the rings' rather than 'lotr'. If you are an advanced user, please help out with tag siblings to help induce this.</p>
<p>Prefixing a namespaced context <i><b>where appropriate</b></i> makes searching more powerful. I can also update the client to parse certain namespaces in different ways, to create clever search predicates, sort orders, collections, presentation rules, whatever.</p>
<p><i>BTW: All searches without a namespace will return all instances, namespaced or not, of that tag; a search for 'levar burton' will return everything with 'levar burton', 'creator:levar burton', 'person:levar burton', 'series:levar burton', whatever. If you then want a specific version of 'levar burton' to narrow it down, use a namespace.</i></p>
<p><i>BTW Part 2, Electric Boogaloo: Nested namespaces do not work. Don't go with something crazy like 'militaries:united states:navy:marine corps:sgt. joe bloggs' as the client will parse that as (militaries):(united states:navy:marine corps:sgt. joe bloggs). Instead use a combination of 'nation:united states', 'usmc', 'person:joe bloggs', 'rank:sergeant' and so on. If this sort of thing appeals to you, you might want to check out <b>tag parents</b> when you are an advanced user.</i></p>
<p>Artists, writers, designers, inkers, production studios, whoever. If they had a substantial hands-on contribution in creating the work, they should get this namespace.</p>say 'show me everything person x has acted in' or 'show me everything person x has contributed to', I don't know. I suppose 'creator:' could be inferred, if we made an agreed-upon list of creator titles.</p>
<p>If the work has an <b>official</b> title, endorsed and promulgated by the creators, add it here.</p>
<p>Your eagle!gandalfXvole!pippin/you self-insertion furry-vore-fanfic commission should get 'series:lord of the rings', not 'title:lord of the rings'. But if the 14-year-old DA artist you paid to vomit out the image named it 'the viscous ardour of the shire', it can and should get 'title:the viscous ardour of the shire'.</p>
<p>Meant primarily for manga and comics. Numerical-only works best. If an image spans more than one page, give it separate tags e.g. 'page:17' and 'page:18', not 'page:17-18'. If you want to specially label title pages, don't go 'page:title'; go 'page:0', 'title page', so it sorts correctly with the chapter's other pages.</p>
<p>Please do add <ahref="advanced_siblings.html">siblings</a> and <ahref="advanced_parents.html">parents</a>! Use some common sense, and if it is something not obvious, please explain the relationship in your submitted reason. If it <i>is</i> something obvious (e.g. 'wings' is a parent of 'angel wings'), don't bother to put a reason in; I'll just approve it.</p>
<p>My general feeling on the correctness of a thing is in how it would describe itself, or how its creator would describe it. As a result, I usually prefer japanese names be written surname first and western names forename first. As I show in my siblings page, please go 'character:rei ayanami'->'character:ayanami rei'. Leave 'person:emma watson' and other western names as they are, obviously.</p>
<p>In general, if there is a more proper foreign name for something, correct any entirely anglicised version back to that, but stick to english letters. 'series:the melancholy of haruhi suzumiya'->'series:haruhi suzumiya no yuuutsu'.</p>
<p>Please <b>do not</b> go 'blah'->'character:blah'. Character siblings are tempting, especially with all the web-harvested tags that give character names unnamespaced, but I just don't like it; siblings are <i>always</i>, and 'blah' might properly be 'person:blah' or 'series:blah' or just a sign that says 'blah'. If you really think one of these is good, please add a reason.</p>
<p>In general, but not <i>extremis</i>, swap out slang for proper terms. 'lube'->'lubricant', 'series:zelda'->'series:the legend of zelda'.</p>
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<h3>parents</h3>
<p>Be shy about adding character:blah->series:whatever, but feel free to do it for main characters. 'character:harry potter'->'series:harry potter' seems fairly uncontroversial, for instance.</p>
<p>Please remember that parents are definitional, not incidental. Don't add a parent because it is usually associated with a child; add it because it is <i>always</i> associated with a child.</p>
<p>I recommend you only put your time into parents that will actually add a lot of tags. You can create a complicated tree like the firearms diagram on my parents page, but if it only adds seven tags, you probably wasted your time. Start with 'person:scarlett johansson'->'female' type stuff, which is guaranteed to make hundreds or thousands of changes.</p>
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<h3>examples</h3>
<p>These are not supposed to be 100% perfect or 100% done, but just to get you thinking:</p>
