Y'know, it's supposed to be tags such as: sound; amateur; no_sound; vertical_video; webm; video; gif; 1:1_aspect_ratio; etc. Instead, I often see things such as "cosplay" marked as metadata.

Actually, "cosplay" is marked as copyright for some reason xd. The problem is that literally anyone can change the type of a given tag regardless of how many posts a given tag has. Tags with more than 5/10k posts should only be editable by moderators imo. Also the fact that anyone can edit the type of any tag creates a scenario where if someone was really upset with the site they would be able to change the type of every tag to "general" e.g. overnight using a simple script

I feel like "cosplay" should be a metadata tag though. All "metadata" really means is a tag that you can't SEE in the image and/or something that relies on outside knowledge. Normal tags like "female" or "stockings" you can see in the image. As far as a cosplay, yes you can view the cosplay and surmise that a person is dressing up as a certain character, but that does require the outside knowledge to recognize the outfit/wig/makeup etc as that character, an outside knowledge that not everyone is going to have (as opposed to the extremely basic outside knowledge needed to recognize most tags).

I guess a really simple way to put it is this: To recognize something as a cosplay vs just a fancy outfit (or maybe even a simple outfit...as there are many low-cost cosplays out there) requires outside knowledge.

All and all I feel like what exactly counts as "metadata" is super hard to pin down, because you can often make arguments one way or the other for almost every metadata tag save a few, but imo "cosplay" does deserve to be a metadata tag.

On another note...it's definitely not a copyright tag lol...what's the copyright? Everything that exists? Cause you can cosplay as basically anything in the entire world. You can cosplay as a tree or a rock if you want.