erinptah: A map. (writing)
humorist + humanist ([personal profile] erinptah) wrote2024-09-05 09:14 pm
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Holmes & Related Fandoms is dead, long live Holmes & Related Fandoms

Some time recently, AO3 tag wranglers de-canonized the “Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms” metatag. This involved detaching the fandom subtags for almost 100 different Holmes-related adaptations, reboots, and spinoffs, and then making the “Related Fandoms” metatag into a synonym of “Sherlock (TV)“.

I don’t actually know when the switch was made (though it couldn’t have been more than 4 weeks ago), but within the past week, fandom-at-large (a) noticed, (b) was horrified, and (c) inundated AO3 Support with a flood of complaints.

Meme: Everyone disliked that.

The fallout is being discussed all over the place — here’s a nice roundup of some reaction links — and there’s a heck of a lot of misinformation swirling around. Gonna try to set some of it straight here.

Disclosure: I’m a wrangler. An average one, not a supervisor or a chair. I don’t wrangle any Holmes-related fandoms, and was not part of the Holmes &RF discussion. This is supposed to be a facts-and-info post; any personal opinions that do show up are my own, not speaking on behalf of any other wrangler(s).

There are some links to individual fics in here — they’re not supposed to represent “good tagging” or “bad tagging”, they’re just examples of “a kind of tagging somebody has done.” Please don’t be weird to the authors.

 

1) Tag wranglers do not change the tags on a work. What we change is what those tags redirect to.

Whatever fandom tags you have typed in on your fic — you always keep those! Wranglers do not edit or replace the text of your fandom tags in any way.

(Caveat: if someone is just blatantly lying, that can be a TOS violation. If someone tags all their fic with the 10 most popular fandoms on the archive, without actually writing about any of them, that would probably get flagged as spam. We’re talking about good-faith tagging here.)

A lot of what wranglers do is making “Tag 1” a synonym of “Tag 2”. This doesn’t replace “Tag 1” on any individual fics. It just makes the filtering for Tag 1 redirect to Tag 2. For example, “BBC Sherlock” has been synned to “Sherlock (TV)” — so any fic that’s only tagged “BBC Sherlock” will show up in the Sherlock (TV) search results. But you can see that nobody force-added “Sherlock (TV)” to the tags on that specific fic.

Similarly, while the Holmes &RF tag was synned to the TV tag, it didn’t rewrite the tags on any fic that only had the &RF tag. Or any fic with multiple different Holmes fandom tags but no Sherlock (TV) tag. So when the synning was reversed, it didn’t require any extra changes to the database — those fics automatically went back into the search results they were in before.

And, look — most of the time, tag synning is good and useful for everyone! Of course fans shouldn’t have to look up “BBC Sherlock” and “Sherlock (TV)” separately — along with “Sherlock (T.V.)” and “Sherlock (TV Series)” and “Sherlock (TV show)” and a hundred other different ways to say the same title — just to get all the fics about this show. Of course you want them all in the same place.

As with many things, you only hear about tag synning when it’s causing people problems to complain about. When it’s working smoothly, you have a good experience and you don’t even notice.

2) Big generic/umbrella fandom metatags can come in a lot of different formats.

Along with syns, wranglers also make metatags and subtags! If you filter on a fandom metatag, you'll get all fics with all the subtags together -- but you can also filter any of the subtags as their own separate thing.

When you have a group of fandoms with different titles, but they’re all based on the same original source, the metatag often ends with “& Related Fandoms“.

Examples:

When it’s a franchise where the different versions have the same title…or, uh, mostly the same title…the metatag often ends with “– All Media Types“.

Examples:

Some fandom metatags were canonized before wranglers got diligent about consistently using the “&RF” or “AMT” suffixes. So they might be just the name of the overall fandom, nothing at the end.

Examples:

All of these are the same general “kind” of tag — a big umbrella tag for an overall franchise.

When you see an official AO3 post like this one use the term “AMTs” for “All Media Types”, they’re talking about big metatags in general, even the ones that don’t use this specific phrasing.

2) Official AO3 wrangling policy is “try to dismantle fandom tag trees.”

When fans write in to Support to request a metatag for their fandoms, they get answers like the response this user got when asking for a Monogatari – All Media Types tag.

(Support has a template answer for this, with officially-approved phrasing, which they adapt slightly depending on what fandom you asked about. That’s pretty standard for them. It would be exhausting if they had to write a fresh response from scratch every time a new user makes the same request.)

The main point: “At this time, tag wranglers are not creating All Media Types tags, and are in fact dismantling them when possible.”

There are some specific reasons given, such as the idea that fandom metatags “confuse both creators and browsing users” and “can make searching and filtering more difficult.” I’m not aware of how these things were determined. Were they based on Support tickets? On seeing lots of confused public Tumblr/Reddit posts? Did we do a poll somewhere? I don’t know.

If I ever see an official AO3 statement that elaborates on these points, I’ll come back and address it here. If you’ve seen one, feel free to comment with the link.

After the public outcry against the dismantling of the Holmes metatag, the one thing we can say for sure is — whatever metrics we’re using to figure out “what will be the least confusing/difficult/generally bad for users?”, they aren’t always right.

3) Big metatag trees don’t cause any technical problems for the AO3 servers.

They used to!

Back in the day, if a fic was written for “Fandom X Movie”, but that had the metatag “Fandom X Trilogy”, which had the metatag “Fandom X Cinematic Universe”, which had the metatag “Fandom X – All Media Types”…that used to strain the servers 4x as much as a fic in a fandom with no metatags.

The code issue is no longer a problem. (I’m not a coder, I can’t explain why in any detail — but the official response from AO3 when people ask about it is, that code has been fixed.)

(ETA: Here's a public-facing response from an AO3 news post, where the head of AO3 Systems was asked about the issue! This was in July 2020.)

So if you hear people saying “I heard it was bad for the servers”…they probably did hear that at some point. And it might have been accurate when they first heard it. But that info is now out-of-date.

Unsurprisingly, this is the origin story of AO3’s “we should look for fandom metatags we can remove, and not create new ones” policy. Of course the tag wrangling committee wanted to be nice to the servers — we didn’t want to make the site fall over.

I don’t recall any official internal discussion about “okay, now that there’s no longer a technical reason to avoid metatags, should we stick with that policy? Or is it creating a worse experience for users?” Not every wrangler thought it was a good idea, you were allowed to say so, and some people did — but the policy didn’t get revisited in any official way.

In the wake of the Holmes blowup, TW Chairs have announced we’re finally going to have that official discussion.

No idea yet what the results will be! We’ll find out.

4) Fandom tag trees only get changed with the combined approval of (a) the wranglers for that fandom, and (b) Tag Wrangling supervisors/chairs.

There’s no one policy that’s automatically mandated for every kind of fandom on AO3. They’re all decided on a case-by-case basis.

Sometimes wranglers will ask for a change, and Chairs will have to approve or deny it. Other times, Chairs will suggest a change (usually passing on a Support request), and the wrangler(s) of the fandom involved will accept or reject it.

(Possible secret third thing: there’s a claim on FFA that Chairs weren’t letting anyone actually wrangle characters/relationships/freeforms in the Holmes &RF metatag. That’s not normal! With most fandom franchises, if the wranglers of the individual fandom subtags want to keep the metatag, they just work together to sort tags from the metatag into the correct fandoms — there’s no technical or administrative interference to stop them from doing that.) (Disclaimer: this is from an anonymous comment, so take that as you will.)

ETA: Asked some questions about this in org chat, and here's my takeaway:

  • Pre-Holmesaggedon, the actual policy about on-hold AMT fandoms was confusing and poorly-conveyed, with wranglers getting mixed messages...and a lot of people reluctant to ask questions, in case the result made things worse for their fandom(s)
  • Post-Holmesageddon, the stated policy is "yes, wranglers are welcome to assign themselves to these AMTs, without any expectation that it'll end in the AMT being dismantled. Chairs will proactively reach out to the wranglers of relevant sub-fandoms, so anyone who's been discouraged away from this before is actively encouraged to go for it now"

As you might have guessed from section (2) above, Chairs will typically approve requests to dismantle an existing metatag, but not to create a new one.

The most well-known exception is probably Video Blogging RPF. A lot of disparate fandoms used to get synned to that tag. (It’s the equivalent of, in the Holmes fandoms, if all the individual fandom tags were synned to “Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms”. You could get all of them together, but you couldn’t narrow it down to just the TV series fics. Or filter out just the TV series fics.)

And then: this May 2022 announcement that series like Dream SMP, Hermitcraft SMP, and SMPLive would start getting their own separate fandom canonicals! Video Blogging RPF would become the metatag that showed you all the fics together, but each fandom could now be searched and filtered separately.

This change happened after years of both wranglers and users requesting a metatag tree, here. As far as I know, there wasn’t an overwhelming write-in campaign all at once, like with the Holmes &RF tag tree — just regular complaints over the years. I don’t know what the turning point was that got Chairs to approve the request, when they previously hadn’t.

Sorry, Monogatari fandom, I’d tell you if I knew.

5) If you write a request to AO3 Support…be cool about it, come on.

Look, I get why AO3 users are frustrated. Both with fandoms where the tags suddenly change in a way that messes up your ability to use them, and fandoms where the tag status-quo has problems that nobody seems to be fixing.

You have no way of knowing if you’re the first user to point something out, or the 500th user to make the same complaint. You don’t know if your request will get passed on to the relevant wranglers at all, or vetoed by Chairs upfront. And when you get a copy-and-paste boilerplate response, it’s easy to forget there’s a person behind that other screen at all.

But there is. Every Support request gets opened by a real human being. Who probably has no connection to the thing you’re complaining about, but who has to read through whatever you wrote so they can figure out what response to send.

Don’t lash out at them, don’t get abusive, generally don’t be a dick.

(ETA: A Support vol shares some numbers on FFA. An average month has 2,000-ish tickets total. As of this update, they've had about 1,000 AMT-related tickets over 4 days.) (This is another anon comment; I will say that it tracks with things I've heard from non-anonymous volunteers.)

Further questions? Ask away.

I’m not here to share anything confidential, or gossipy/grudgewanky. (No “can you believe Wrangler X wanted to do so-and-so with Fandom Y??” type stuff.)

But there’s a lot of normal, non-secret information about How Tagging Works that many AO3 users just…don’t know. Or aren’t sure about. Or you’ve heard conflicting things and don’t know how to confirm which one is real. Or whatever.

So, hey, ask that stuff here. I’ll do my best to answer. Anything I don’t know, I’ll go looking for someone who does.

Some links:

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