At what point is the landscape tag not appropriate? I have noticed quite a few pictures are tagged with landscape that one might assume the artist was trying to focus on a particular character or group of characters.

I can see where a nature scene replete with random human swimmers in a water feature could remain tagged with landscape in much the same way one might disregard a crowd of people in a cityscape.

The wiki entry for landscape even seems to promote tagging character centric images with natural wilderness type backgrounds with the landscape tag.

At what point is the landscape tag not appropriate?

When the image no longer comprises the visible features of an area of land. Right now we are using the same broad definition as Danbooru so if there is a landscape in the image it can be tagged landscape. The landscape doesn't have to be the central focus of the image.

Is there a particular reason we are following rather than leading.

Few artists consider a portrait with a park in the background a landscape and a portrait. In the classical sense the term is used to classify images that are predominantly devoid of obvious subjects other than the natural background itself, often a subject (if included ) will be a particularly interesting part of the fauna or in some cases a portion of land modified by humans (farms etc.), foregrounds are sometimes used and also treat the viewer to additional natural elements as mentioned above.

I believe the tag simple_background sets a workable precedent, maybe a set of descriptive terms followed by _background would be preferable. I would think landscape_background would be an unfortunate catch-all and so can't suggest its use myself; but desert_background, ocean_background, plains_background, etc. seem both simple and more descriptive.

I would like to see the landscape tag remain but have it defined in a more classical way.

Just food for thought, and thanks for your reply

~72% of our content comes from Danbooru so we follow their tagging policies the vast majority of the time. We don't have enough moderators to do otherwise.

This has already been explained dozens of times, but the reason we follow Danbooru's tagging policy is that we have no choice. Around 70% of Gelbooru's posts come straight in from Danbooru, with Danbooru's tags. This causes enough problems when it's something that can simply be aliased, but in this case, it's something that would need to be checked on an image-by-image basis by an actual person to verify that the images matches the criteria.

For a tag like this, no one is actually going to consistently do this, so even if we were to change our policy to deviate from Danbooru's, it'd still end up mirroring their policy anyway.

Additionally, the tag isn't being used in the sense of an artistic landscape. It's being used to describe images with a landscape, as in a section of actual land visible, in them at all. Remember, tags aren't being used to define the image, they're being used to make it searchable. The tag is for if someone wants to search for an image with a landscape in it. there being an immediate, human subject in the foreground shouldn't require them to use an entirely separate search for it.

There is no point in adding more tags for the purpose of having a tag that fits the classical definition. Currently, one can simply search [[landscape no_humans]] and get more or less the exact same thing. Additionally, such tags would never be maintained. We could dictate tagging policy like this all day, but only a fraction of the actual userbase would see it, and a smaller fraction would actually apply it. Our current moderation staff is less than 20 people, which is barely enough to monitor uploads for rule violations, much less make sure all 1.6 million images on the site are properly tagged. A rule of thumb with cases like this is that if it isn't a tag that a very large number of people will be searching, and it isn't a tag that will reliably come in from danbooru properly applied on the 70% of images that Danbooru supplies, then knowledge of the tag will be too sparse for it to actually be used.

If you would like to start a public pool for landscapes in the classical sense, go right ahead. However, we aren't going to sacrifice a tag's usefulness in searches to make it more useful in describing the image. That's not what tags are for at all.