Should a car implicate its manufacturer?

Posted under Tags

BUR #43708 is pending approval.

create implication nissan_skyline -> nissan

Take nissan as an example. All of the posts tagged with nissan contain a car manufactured by the company, so the purpose of the tag seems clear, but if you look at a search like nissan_skyline -nissan there are many posts remaining, all of which would qualify for the nissan tag based on the way it seems to be used. There are currently no tags that implicate nissan.

Is this a purposeful choice to remove unnecessary hierarchies or has it just been overlooked?
If it's the former, I'd argue that this is a hierarchy that is useful. I can certainly see myself wanting to see every car manufactured by Nissan, and perhaps others can too. In this case that can be achieved with a search for nissan_*, but there are tags like honda where honda_* shows too many unrelated images like honda_mio and tags like asimo are not included, or as a lesser example audi_* includes results for audi_(tsuaii).

To gauge opinion, I include as a BUR what is the largest specific car tag that I am aware of to test the waters: the nissan_skyline.
There are a lot of individual car tags, and I would like to see what people think of the idea generally before specific implications are created for all of them. If opinion seems positive, we can make the other car -> manufacturer implications, either here or in topic #23187.

Related threads:
topic #23187 - Similar idea, but concerning model -> line implications. No mention of manufacturer.

Other notes:
There is potentially a similar case to be made for aircraft implicating their manufacturer (f-104_starfighter -> lockheed_martin, boeing 747 -> boeing) but let's talk about cars first, as I believe there are more implication-permitted car tags than there are large enough aircraft tags.

Damian0358 said:

Technically, we've had topic #21789, which seems to imply it's fine, but it's a debate worth having in case others disagree.

Good spot. I did look back through the forum but missed that one. I'll still wait a little bit though and see what people think of this as a blanket thing.

This is a related question: should the manufacturers be copytags instead of general tags? Aircraft manufacturers seem to be copytags as a rule, and we use copytags for other brands like microsoft.

CrossbowArcanePlus said:

This is a related question: should the manufacturers be copytags instead of general tags? Aircraft manufacturers seem to be copytags as a rule, and we use copytags for other brands like microsoft.

Well, there's two aspects which influence whether or not something should be a copytag when we're dealing with stuff that isn't anime and manga and video games and books and all: firstly, is there a character that's associated with the thing in question, and secondly, is the tag being used just for references to and instances of that thing or is the tag about that thing?

Using the case of Tenga for example, in topic #29602, it got turned into a copytag due to Tenga Robo, but nonamethanks additionally remarked that "I'd say even without the mascot, Tenga is one of those things that have become a copyright of their own. We have a lot of posts that are about Tenga rather than just featuring it in a corner, it's not just about it being a brand anymore."

Microsoft has several anime mascot characters that have been used in East Asia over the years (and otherwise don't fall under OS-tan - and I don't think personification chartags do not count on this, those should be original, but I don't think that's been standardized copytag-wise), so they qualified under the first point, but a lot of posts under the tag are also very clearly about Microsoft or Microsoft products which may not have a narrower copytag. So the question becomes, for manufacturers, are the tags about the things they make or are the tags about them specifically (and is there a distinction between the two)? There's an argument that could be made that it is arbitrary that aircraft manufacturers are copytags, and should be gentags instead (and if you believe the manufactured should imply the manufacturer, them being gentags would allow for those implications, as cross-category implications aren't allowed).

I think I understand, thanks for the explanation, and that for car brands overall they should remain gentags.

Points for gentag:

  • They have no mascots, to my knowledge. Nissan certainly doesn't.
  • Images are usually of the cars, not of characterisations of the cars.
  • The wiki for copyrights specifically references car makes and models being gentag.

Points for copyright:

  • I don't know enough about Tenga to understand why it's a special case even without the mascot. The logic at the end of that quote that an image being "about" something lends weight to Nissan being a copytag, because many images feature a Nissan car as the primary subject, but I think it's just a lack in my understanding about Tenga that leads to what is an overly broad interpretation there.

lockheed_martin has a confounding factor on top of this, which is that right now many of the images are personifications, but if you were to add all of the images that could be reasonably considered to show "Lockheed Martin" (like all of the images in f-104_starfighter or f-22 raptor which both actually have more images than lockheed_martin right now) then that would change, and planes manufactured by Lockheed Martin would become the larger category of items again.
I think the tag should probably become gentag too regardless of the images it is currently applied to. It would be silly to not be able to tag a Lockheed Martin plane as lockheed_martin.

There's also forum #153725 indicating that evazion would be against tagging nissan on Skylines to begin with.

However, as it is now in practice, the vast majority of tagged cars have their brands tagged too. If we want to really stop doing that, we'll need a bunch of gardening (probably ongoing as people add them back) and to decide how to actually use the brand tags.

If we continue with the status quo, implications make sense. The posts that currently lack the brand tags don't do so for any special reason that I can see.

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