Contributor
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2018
- Messages
- 162
While I'm all in favour of adding a few more different tags, here's a take: I don't think Official Colored as a tag is providing much use.
At a first glance, it seems pretty clear cut what should be tagged with Official Colored: works that were coloured by the original/official artists/editors. That's what I took it as when I first started editing works on MD, and it wasn't until I was provided a clarification that I stopped tagging works as such. The tag is rather meant for titles that were first released in black and white, but colored afterwards in by an official entity. This was to juxtapose it with the Fan Colored works (which was a necessary tag because wow, were there a lot of those in early MD).
My concern is that, as more and more people gain the ability to edit (and with current Contributors/Group Leaders old and new not knowing of this), people will continue to use the tag in the wrong way. Currently, 1446 titles are using the tag, which must mean that's it's both popular for group leaders/contributors, right? But adding Long Strip into the search with Official Colored gives us 1156/1446 of the titles, or 80% of everything Official Colored. And, in my experience of editing *a lot* of Full Color Long Strip titles that are also tagged as Official Colored, almost every single time it's a work that was originally released in full color. Which then means I have to edit out the Official Colored tag and hope that someone doesn't re-tag it as that again. And again. If you do the search yourself for works that are both Official Colored and Long Strip, I think at the moment literally all of the titles on the first search page aren't actually Official Colored but simply Full Color.
There are also surely other works that aren't Long Strip but are Full Color, and are instead tagged as Official Colored. And having the vast majority of people using a singular tag wrongly means that there's probably something wrong with how people view the tag. I get that there's a use for it, but I think that rather than having a dedicated and confusing tag, it'd be simpler to just not tag Official Colored works as Fan Colored. As such, the solution would be that if it's tagged Full Color and Fan Colored, it was coloured by a fan, and if it's tagged Full Color but there's no Fan Colored, then you can presume it was officially coloured.
Apologies if this should have gone into the v5 suggestions thread, but I thought some more nuanced discussion would be better for this issue. Thoughts, opinions, etc.?
At a first glance, it seems pretty clear cut what should be tagged with Official Colored: works that were coloured by the original/official artists/editors. That's what I took it as when I first started editing works on MD, and it wasn't until I was provided a clarification that I stopped tagging works as such. The tag is rather meant for titles that were first released in black and white, but colored afterwards in by an official entity. This was to juxtapose it with the Fan Colored works (which was a necessary tag because wow, were there a lot of those in early MD).
My concern is that, as more and more people gain the ability to edit (and with current Contributors/Group Leaders old and new not knowing of this), people will continue to use the tag in the wrong way. Currently, 1446 titles are using the tag, which must mean that's it's both popular for group leaders/contributors, right? But adding Long Strip into the search with Official Colored gives us 1156/1446 of the titles, or 80% of everything Official Colored. And, in my experience of editing *a lot* of Full Color Long Strip titles that are also tagged as Official Colored, almost every single time it's a work that was originally released in full color. Which then means I have to edit out the Official Colored tag and hope that someone doesn't re-tag it as that again. And again. If you do the search yourself for works that are both Official Colored and Long Strip, I think at the moment literally all of the titles on the first search page aren't actually Official Colored but simply Full Color.
There are also surely other works that aren't Long Strip but are Full Color, and are instead tagged as Official Colored. And having the vast majority of people using a singular tag wrongly means that there's probably something wrong with how people view the tag. I get that there's a use for it, but I think that rather than having a dedicated and confusing tag, it'd be simpler to just not tag Official Colored works as Fan Colored. As such, the solution would be that if it's tagged Full Color and Fan Colored, it was coloured by a fan, and if it's tagged Full Color but there's no Fan Colored, then you can presume it was officially coloured.
Apologies if this should have gone into the v5 suggestions thread, but I thought some more nuanced discussion would be better for this issue. Thoughts, opinions, etc.?
