why couldn’t the tag just be their name
It could, but it risks multiple tags for the same artist. For more known artists they will get merged eventually, but for ones with like 14 images, there’s a good chance no one will recognize the style or randomly decide to investigate the tags. Hence it’s good to keep the tag to serve as a TODO note that this image’s tags need attention. artist needed
can also be used for this purpose, but it’s less informative/expressive. artist in description
marks the low hanging fruit: there’s some data available to kickstart the investigation. People might be more willing to work on these rather than on a random “artist needed, BP upload, no signature, no source” image.
it should be removed from the image once a name is tagged
Yes, it should definitely be removed after the problem is fixed.
Overall it won’t be the end of the world if we alias it to artist needed
, but I think that would turn some signal into noise and I don’t like that.