Problem with tag aliases

So, am I the only one who still has a problem with tags being aliased to something that most people never refer to them as? I know it’s not that big of a deal. But I’ve known this character as Misty for years and I really don’t see the point in changing it to Kasumi. I guess the reason why I have a problem with it is because it would get VERY confusing to new users on the site. And I know it’s supposed the character’s name in Japanese. And everything else on this site is in English. I would suggest only aliasing a tag when absolutely necessary and not something only specific people know about or at least give us an option in our settings to change the language of the site.

The problem is that without alias forcing the replacement, you end up with some images on one name and some on the other. So people search for Misty, and only find part of the images for her.

So a decision had to be made one way or the other. And at some point earlier in the site's past the decision was made to go with Japanese names. Arguments can be made either way, but one direction or the other had to be made. And for consistency sake the decision really needs to be uniform across the site. For most series this only boils down to the order of personal and family names. Pokemon is one of the exceptions since it regularly gives names in English that are totally different from the Japanese names.

Leortha said:

The problem is that without alias forcing the replacement, you end up with some images on one name and some on the other. So people search for Misty, and only find part of the images for her.

So a decision had to be made one way or the other. And at some point earlier in the site's past the decision was made to go with Japanese names. Arguments can be made either way, but one direction or the other had to be made. And for consistency sake the decision really needs to be uniform across the site. For most series this only boils down to the order of personal and family names. Pokemon is one of the exceptions since it regularly gives names in English that are totally different from the Japanese names.

Well I still think it is a pointless thing to do and it doesn’t change the fact that it feels like more of an opinionated thing. And again, tags should only be aliased to something that is actually necessary.

Examples:

PPG would be aliased to PowerPuff Girls or CMC would be aliased to Cutie Mark Crusaders. But there is no need to alias a tag to something in a completely different language. And it really gets confusing. I just hope you understand where I’m getting at. And I also really hope I’m not the only one here who has a problem with this regardless if it’s not that big of a deal.

i dont like it either tbh. im not familiar with the Japanese names as much.

ilovelolicon said:

And again, tags should only be aliased to something that is actually necessary.

I think we will disagree on what is "necessary". IMHO, if you have two distinct names for something, one should be picked, and the two aliased between them. Without that, you end up with a fragmented tag system, with some images tagged one way, some the other, and some tagged both. That's a chaotic and not very user friendly way to do it.

Which direction the alias goes is a totally separate matter, and one that I do not have a strong opinion about. But IMHO the alias itself is absolutely necessary.

One interesting tidbit in this is that, for the pokemon themselves, species names, we have them aliased in the other direction. Japanese -> English. So we go one direction with the human characters, and the opposite with the pokemon species.

Maybe Pokemon as a franchise should be an exception to the "Use Japanese names" policy. It would be a lot of work to move the characters over to the English names, but it's not an undoable amount of work.