'infidelity' and 'adultery': Proposal for tag redefinition/reuse

I’d like to propose a change to a couple of tags.
 
infidelity has 1400+ images, with the description “Cheating, adultery, or having an outside affair.”
 
adultery has 450+ images, and no description.
 
I think both tags are potentially useful, but both are being misused. I’m aware that cleaning this up would be a challenge, but please consider the utility of separating two concepts:
 
First, “infidelity” is normally defined as violation of rules or disloyalty or breach of trust. While “adultery” does show up in some definitions, “infidelity” carries a connotation of unethical action that goes against a partner’s expectations or their trust. I think “cheating” is a good synonym; it means that there is a rule that is being broken.
 
Currently, depribooru’s infidelity tag is used for any situation where a married character has sex with someone other than their spouse, unless there is clear evidence of polyamory or open relationship, and even that’s not terribly consistent. Several ship tags imply infidelity. I think it’s a disservice to assume, from a tagging perspective, that that any extramarital sex is a breach of trust. Open relationships exist, as does polyamory. Especially on a site which features all sorts of unusual pairings, practices, and fetishes, such an assumption is counterproductive. Of course, some folks would like to filter out any images that feature disrespect of monogamous marriage, which brings me to my second point:
 
Adultery has the simpler and less-loaded meaning of “a married person having sex with a person who is not their spouse”. The New York penal code defines it as such. Thus the adultery tag can amply cover any cases of married characters engaging in extramarital sex, whether that involves a breach of trust or not. It’s sensible for an image to be tagged “adultery, polyamory” when it is clear no infidelity is taking place, and “adultery, infidelity” when it is clear that someone is cheating. Where the situation is unclear, “adultery” is fine by itself; it merely describes the action and passes no judgement.
 
One more link describing the difference.
 
Why this matters:
 
Excuse me for being a bit self-centered here – though I hope I am not alone – but I enjoy seeing images of married characters exploring extramarital pairings, but I do not, in general, like to see obvious cheating. In images where the situation is ambiguous, I like to assume that extramarital sex is totally within-bounds and no one is being betrayed. (I’m an optimist that way.) As it stands now, I must search for polyamory, which will miss a lot of potentially wonderful images, or infidelity, which will include images I don’t want to see.
 
TL;DR: When married ponies have extramarital sex, they may be cheating, not cheating, or it may be unclear. Being able to easily filter/search for the three options by tags would be just swell.
 
Proposal:
 
Any images currently tagged “infidelity” should be changed to “adultery”, as this is (mostly) how the tag is being used now. This obviously won’t be perfect, but it will work for 90%+ of current images. The definition of adultery should be: “A married character having sex with someone who is not their spouse. This includes polyamory, open relationships, and cheating.”
 
The “infidelity” tag should be defined as: “Adultery, where it is clear from the dialogue or context that a character is being unfaithful or cheating. Do not use where there is possiblity of open relationship or polyamory.”
 
If this change is implemented, I’d be willing to help with or lead the cleanup. With the change, “adultery” would be a tag I’d browse frequently and I’d make it a point to fix up the tags as appropriate. I can even commit to systematically going through all the images so tagged; at an average of 10 per day I alone could get through them all in 4.5 months.
 
Thanks for listening, and I hope I made a good argument. I really do think this change would be very useful.

Bumping for continued discussion and/or forum organizational purposes.

Without saying how I feel about the overall change, I do think the default should be Infidelity.
 
Adultery should only apply when there is a clear statement that there is no unfaithfulness or cheating.

I’m all for using these tag(s) more, I like to assume that a canon married character having sex with someone that isn’t their spouse should be infidelity unless proven or spoken of otherwise, the tag can be removed from like pre-marriage situations or polyamory just fine.

@LightningBolt  
That sounds good. I’m in favor of that implementation.

@Ciaran  
Mainly I see it as a catch-all for ‘married character fucking/kissing/holding hooves with someone that isn’t their spouse’ without the need for anyone to create complex filters or syntax to not have to see it. It doesn’t have to always be 100 relevant, and a little note from the artist saying “Oh this is totally NOT cheating btw lol” isn’t always gonna cut it for some people, or not be noticed right away.
 
At least that’s my interpretation and opinion on it.

Thanks for the replies. :-)
 
The main thrust of my argument is that “definitely cheating”, “definitely not cheating”, and “maybe cheating” should all three be separately filterable/searchable.
 
@Ciaran  

 
Can you help me understand why “infidelity” should be considered default, at the cost of ignoring part of the distinction above? I fully understand that in our world it’s usually the case that adultery is cheating. Yet this site, in large part through its tagging system, (whether this is the primary intent or not) is very useful for finding kinks people enjoy, or filtering out ones they don’t like. To me, it’s not about reflecting the biases of real world; it’s about letting people see what they like.
 
@LightningBolt  

 
Right, and there’s nothing that prevents you from assuming that. I just want the opposite assumption to get equal respect. If “adultery” is the catch-all, and “infidelity” and “polyamory”/“swinging” are more precise specifiers where there is evidence, then everyone can get what they want.
 
(The “swinging” tag could seriously use some cleanup as well, as it’s being used for open-relationship-style swinging and actual swinging – like, on a swing – though that’s a bit of a tangent.)
 
ETA: I don’t really care for the idea that “adultery” should be used exclusively for cases where there is no cheating. Adultery doesn’t imply the “breaking a promise” condition in one direction or the other. “Infidelity” does.

@Softy  
I pick infidelity as default over adultery as it has been tagged four times as much. Basic math. :P

@LightningBolt
 
“Adultery” is pretty much redundant right now**, which is why I think it can be Smoozed – all existing instances of “infidelity” can be changed to “adultery”. I don’t main aliasing or implication; I mean find-and-replace so that there are zero instances of “infidelity” remaining. (I’m assuming such a mass tag change can be done.) The reborn “infidelity” tag can then be used for the definite cases.
 
** Searching for (adultery, NOT infidelity) reveals 44 images, almost all of which should be tagged as “infidelity” under the current system. That’s why I think they’re not a concern and nothing will be lost through he renaming. On the contrary, the proposed change will automatically clean up this redundancy.

Excuse me if I’m just repeating myself, but just in case my ramblings are making things unclear, my proposal boils down to:
 

@Softy  

 
No they can’t.
 
@Softy  

@Ciaran  

 
What value is there is having this presumption built into the system? What would be lost by removing it?  

 
What do you mean by “ignoring”? Do you mean filtering by it (which I definitely don’t want) or just pretending it doesn’t exist?
 
ETA: I’m clearly not understanding something, because there’s a spirited defense of… something about the system-wide assumption that adultery = infidelity. I can’t see what that could possibly be. I’m not in any way suggesting that the personal assumption should be done away with. I’m not saying that people who assume that are wrong or that their user experience should be made more difficult. My proposal does none of that. I only want that personal assumption put on equal footing with the opposite assumption; for both to be catered to by the system. I really, truly don’t see how anyone ends up a loser here, no matter what you want to personally assume.

@Softy  
Thank you for telling me that I’m wrong to assume that if Mrs. Cake is having sex with someone other than Mr. Cake then it is infidelity. I disagree. I think that’s the right assumption.
 
You are asking to have all existing pictures of Mrs. Cake is having sex with someone other than Mr. Cake “de-infidelity-ized” because there’s no statement saying that “Mr. Cake is not ok with this” - when especially for cuck and other fetishes that is the whole point of the image.
 
I think you need to prove the opposite - I think to remove the infidelity aspect of adulterous pictures you need a clear statement that the spouse is ok with it.
 
And right now you’re not proving that is true as a general rule across all images of infidelity on the site.
 
So I vote No to removing infidelity from all the images and filters on the site.

@Ciaran  

 
I said no such thing. In fact in my latest post I said the exact opposite.
 
I truly don’t want this to get personal, but I’m feeling you have a bias against me and are misconstruing my suggestion as being hostile or denigrating. It is not. I took a lot of time to think this through. I am making the point, repeatedly, that the goal is to cater to people’s individual assumptions, whatever their preference, without disparaging them.
 

 
If you have a cuck fetish, then search for (adultery, NOT polyamory, NOT swinging). The result will be all the images where it can seem like infidelity is taking place. Search for infidelity if you want to be sure it’s taking place.
 
What would you be missing?
 
Again, again, again, I am not saying that Mrs. Cake-sexing-Braeburn should just be stripped of any indicators. I’m not saying it should be assumed to be okay. I’m saying let’s not have the system assume; let’s let viewers assume what they want and give them to tools to deal with that how they want.

@Softy  
You are saying:
 

 
No. That would remove the infidelity tag from images like this >>20466 which is CLEARLY infidelity.
 
As @LightningBolt said, “a canon married character having sex with someone that isn’t their spouse should be infidelity unless proven or spoken of otherwise”.
 
You want to reverse that, so that infidelity has to be explicitly called out.
 
I don’t think we should do that.

@Ciaran  

 
And there’s currently no way to know whether a random image with “infidelity” is CLEARLY infidelity or not. HOw would changing the tag to “adultery” change the functionality?

I feel like perhaps you two may be getting confused at what eachother is saying/means, however I’m not an expert on talking, quite the opposite rather, but idk, I just get the ‘not on the same page’ vibe going on here.
 
Correct me if I’m wrong.

@Softy  

 
You’re proposing that we remove it from all the images, without review. There’s no value gained in doing so, and you are destroying unspecified volumes of good data in the process.
 
If the infidelity tag needs a review, then we can review it. But I think we should review it under the guidelines that @LightningBolt suggested - not yours.

@LightningBolt  
Oh, definitely. What we have is a failure to communicate.
 
Ciaran thinks I want the restaurant to stop serving Coke and switch to Pepsi, because I like Pepsi more than Coke, when what I actually want is the restaurant to offer both.

@Ciaran  

 
I’m proposing replacing it. There would be no data loss.
 
I’m a friggin’ developer who just today was dealing with rebuilding a SQL table. A column name needed to be changed (among other things). There was no data loss; I’d have failed at the task if there had been.

@Softy  
Your Curricula Vitae doesn’t really sway me in your proposal:
 
@Softy  

 
I vote no.
 
Is that clear enough?

@Ciaran  
Okay. I think I made a strong case. I’m disappointed I couldn’t convince you.

Truthfully I don’t think people here care too much about super specific definitions for things, considering we have ‘futa’ as a catch all for intersex ponies here, vagina being tagged on simple vulva lines, and all the piss tags being pretty randomly applied to sexual and non-sexual piss images, I tthink we can afford to slide a bit on definitions of adultery versus infidelity, considering keeping the latter as the main will require less work from us (staff) and is more widely filtered/tagged anyway.
 
Should they aliased together tho? Probably, I doubt many people care about the picky semantics at play with them.

There’s “vagina”, but there’s “anatomically correct”.  
There’s “urine”, but there’s “watersports”.  
“futa”… is pretty well defined actually.
 
All I wanted is the ability to filter out explicit cheating, while viewing images of extramarital affairs. My proposal would’ve made that possible without harming anyone’s ability to filter according to their tastes.
 
But the consensus seems to be that extramarital should be infidelity, for everyone, whether they like it or not.
 
Yeah, I’m a bit bitter right now. Excuse me.

Improving the descriptions and reviewing the applications of those tags is a good idea.
 
Of the 1,432 images tagged “Infidelity”, there are 1,023 that are not tagged “Adultery”.
 
Of the 452 images tagged “Adultery”, there are 408 that are not tagged “Infidelity”.
 
About 200 people either filter or watch the tag “Infidelity”.
 
About 100 people either filter or watch the tag “Adultery”.
 
Today on the site, the tag “Adultery” and “Infidelity” are different things. On some images there is one but not the other. On some images there are both tags. But - they are not the same thing.
 
Your proposal is:
 

 
Replacing the tag infidelity with adultery presumes that all the images currently tagged infidelity were mis-tagged or were not tagged that way intentionally by the artist or the uploader, or that a subsequent review of the use of the tag on the image by the community or staff was somehow in error.
 
And that the 100 people who filter or watch adultery but who do not filter or watch infidelity (assuming those sets merge in that way) do not see some difference between those images in the current implementation of those words.
 
The consensus is not, as you stated, that extramarital sex is infidelity for everyone.
 
The consensus is that there is such a thing as infidelity, that it is discrete from adultery, that some if not most of the images with that tag were appropriately tagged, and that the tag should not simply be wiped out by replacing all occurrences of the tag “infidelity” with “adultery”.
 
Because those are not the same thing.