What is the commentary tag for?

Posted under Tags

I earlier rewrote the introductory paragraph for commentary, possibly due to a misunderstanding as to what this tag is actually for.

The first wiki said this:

Posts with this tag have the artist's accompanying commentary from the original site translated and posted as a comment.

Pretty unambiguously for translated commentary. A few years later it was updated to say:

Posts with this tag have the artist's accompanying commentary from the original site posted (and, if necessary, translated into English) as a comment. For untranslated artist commentary, use commentary_request.

Now it seems to say the tag is for any presence of artist commentary, regardless of whether it was translated by a user or not. It may also be implying that the commentary may or may not allready be in English. However, it also states to use commentary request for posts containing untranslated commentary, implying commentary to be analogous to translated. The part about posting the commentary as a comment was also removed a few years later, since a separate field for artist commentary was added. Then a few months ago it received its last major update, saying:

Posts with this tag have artist commentary which is completely rendered in English or symbols, with any original other-language commentary, if present, kept in the "original" section of the commentary field. For untranslated artist commentary, use commentary request instead, plus the corresponding [language]_commentary tag if not Japanese.

This one is now clearer in the fact it only applies to English commentary, whether translated or not, but it's written in kind of an asinine way. Definitely could've been worded better. Still has the problem of implying itself to be a translated equivalent for artist commentary.

English commentary was implicated to commentary in topic #15162, but undone soon after due to issues with artist commentary containing multiple languages.

This is where my confusion lies. Why are we tagging english commentary posts with commentary? We already have a tag for commentary written in English by the artist, it's called english commentary. If the original intent was for commentary that was translated by us from a non-English language, how exactly does commentary that was never translated by one of our users, because it was already written in English by the artist, also fall under that umbrella? That doesn't make sense. We don't tag images featuring English text as translated, we use english text and move on. No one would use commentary to find commentary that's originally in English, because it's filled to the brim with non-English commentary that has been translated. Likewise, commentary now has 45k posts that never needed to be translated to begin with, which if you wanted to find you would just use english commentary.

I can't think of a single benefit to overlapping these two tags like this. Effectively, commentary is being used for two completely opposite things: commentary that has been translated, and commentary that hasn't been translated, only because they end up sharing the same language. At that point, commentary might as well just be aliased to english commentary, since being in English is the only thing they have in common, despite the fact one started in English and the other didn't.

My understanding is that commentary is for all commentaries that are readable by the average (english-speaking) user as-is. English commentaries, translated commentaries, symbol commentaries, ascii, character names etc all fall under this because they require no knowledge of other languages to interpret.
english commentary is specifically for english commentaries, and is a subset of commentary on danbooru, unless it's used with mixed-language commentary.

Guaro1238 said:

I second that.

For such things as symbol commentary I never really thought about using commentary with it, because I rather thought that commentary is for readable commentaries.

Same because symbol_commentary is "readable" per se.
But if I want "actual" commentary, as in real sentences, I wouldn't want to see the sunflower emoji in that field.

(The same goes with character/copyright names, I don't personally think the commentary tag is needed there)

nonamethanks said:

My understanding is that commentary is for all commentaries that are readable by the average (english-speaking) user as-is. English commentaries, translated commentaries, symbol commentaries, ascii, character names etc all fall under this because they require no knowledge of other languages to interpret.
english commentary is specifically for english commentaries, and is a subset of commentary on danbooru, unless it's used with mixed-language commentary.

Okay, that's a bit more reasonable, though I echo the sentiment that describing symbols and similar as "readable" feels a little off. Well, it's not quite as bad a situation as I had interpreted it to be. I have two suggestions then.

The first is obvious, the wiki needs to reflect this stated use more clearly. A list of what it actually encompasses would help as well.

Second, would a translated commentary tag be of any use? If it was just commentary and english commentary, then commentary -english_commentary would work, but since commentary can apply to multiple different things, some of which may not have tags, it's not really possible currently even with 3+ tags to only search for commentary that has been translated.

As understand, users need choose between commentary and commentary request.
Commentary request + *_commentary (* language without English and commentary) -- not translated.
English commentary -- Original Artist [[English] text in Commentary.
commentary -- Include English commentary and translated *_commentary.
Commentary request without second language(s) -- Only original Artist based Japanese text. (May be marked as mixed-language commentary with second language tag(s)).

See help:artist_commentary:

All posts with commentary should be tagged with either commentary or commentary request, although these tags can be automatically added so the need to do so is entirely optional.
<...>
Once all relevant parts of the commentary are translated into English, the commentary request tag should be removed and replaced with the commentary tag. If you are unsure of the translation, add the check commentary tag.

Symbol commentary, Dated commentary, Completion time, morse code commentary - need review wiki, write rules about mark second tags.
Recommend:
Symbol commentary + commentary -- only symbols in commentary;
Symbol commentary + (*_commentary +- Commentary request (translated or without translation)) -- Symbols mixed into text. (May be marked as mixed-language commentary with second language tag(s));
Dated commentary without language tag -- Japanese commentary (first part), digit time (second time like HH:MM (23:59)).
Dated commentary + *_commentary (*language) -- Language detect in commentary as text or identificatory (like as "23 h 52 m");
Twitter sparkles + Symbol commentary + commentary -- As part Symbol commentary without implication (because may be on image);
Twitter sparkles + Symbol commentary + *_commentary -- Repeat Symbol commentary rules;
morse code commentary + Commentary request -- always need decode to readable text.

mujun-gatamari -- without edit, because small posts count (26) and not always used as artist commentary.

Updated by user 418258

nonamethanks said:

My understanding is that commentary is for all commentaries that are readable by the average (english-speaking) user as-is. English commentaries, translated commentaries, symbol commentaries, ascii, character names etc all fall under this because they require no knowledge of other languages to interpret.
english commentary is specifically for english commentaries, and is a subset of commentary on danbooru, unless it's used with mixed-language commentary.

Problem written in the topic #15162. Link to the topic include to english_commentary.

This tag is not to be used for commentary that is translated into English by a Danbooru user.

We not have tag for all commentary. For search image with any commentary users should be use "commentary:true"
I fixed descriptions about this in the wiki-pages.

For now I've rewritten the introductory paragraph to reflect the usage described by nonamethanks. It should now be at least somewhat more accurate than it was before.

Dolmatov said:

Problem written in the topic #15162. Link to the topic include to english_commentary.

We not have tag for all commentary. For search image with any commentary users should be use "commentary:true"
I fixed descriptions about this in the wiki-pages.

I'm not sure why you removed english commentary and engrish commentary from the list of language commentaries, but I've added them back. Even if they weren't supposed to be used in conjunction with commentary, which they are, they are still languages the commentary can be in, and shouldn't be excluded from a list of language commentary tags.

Please refrain from further edits to the commentary wiki for the time being.

nonamethanks said:

My understanding is that commentary is for all commentaries that are readable by the average (english-speaking) user as-is. English commentaries, translated commentaries, symbol commentaries, ascii, character names etc all fall under this because they require no knowledge of other languages to interpret.
english commentary is specifically for english commentaries, and is a subset of commentary on danbooru, unless it's used with mixed-language commentary.

I agree with this, I see no reasons not to tag commentary on those posts.

Also, it would be nice if you didn't start removing the tag from those posts before a conclusion has been reached.

Unbreakable said:

Also, it would be nice if you didn't start removing the tag from those posts before a conclusion has been reached.

I'm going to assume that's directed at me? Because I had misunderstood for quite a while what commentary was for, I have occasionally removed the tag from posts that were tagged english commentary, that's my mistake, sorry. I haven't made any such edits since starting this thread, however.

blindVigil said:

I'm going to assume that's directed at me? Because I had misunderstood for quite a while what commentary was for, I have occasionally removed the tag from posts that were tagged english commentary, that's my mistake, sorry. I haven't made any such edits since starting this thread, however.

I was just referring to the 6 posts you removed the tag from 10 hours ago, if you know that then it's fine.

Unbreakable said:

I was just referring to the 6 posts you removed the tag from 10 hours ago, if you know that then it's fine.

Those edits were made right before I realized I might have made a mistake, when I finally noticed just how many posts were tagged both commentary and english commentary. I started this thread after making those edits, and just hadn't gone back to undo them.

@blindVigil Please check for english_commentary
This should provide insight into the use of the tag when translating languages mixed with English.

Show

Artist commentary that is originally written in English.

  • This tag is not to be used for commentary that is translated into English by a Danbooru user.

Full translated commentary from another language should be tagged commentary without this tag.

  • This tag should not be used when the commentary contains no actual English - such as commentaries consisting solely of the names of one or more characters. Exist tag symbol commentary.
  • Combinate with tag commentary for artist commentary based only English text.

This tag does not implicate commentary because it covers cases where only part of the commentary is in English (topic #15162). Such as different language for commentary header and body - character name in header with description based another language.

See also

It also explains compatibility with the base tag commentary, since it now has a description:

For use on posts where the artist commentary is understandable by the average English speaker.
...
the original commentary was already in English

nonamethanks said:

My understanding is that commentary is for all commentaries that are readable by the average (english-speaking) user as-is. English commentaries, translated commentaries, symbol commentaries, ascii, character names etc all fall under this because they require no knowledge of other languages to interpret.
english commentary is specifically for english commentaries, and is a subset of commentary on danbooru, unless it's used with mixed-language commentary.

I've always naturally intepreted the usage of commentary this way too.

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