Hi! Thanks for this writeup and sympathies for all the blowback you guys have been experiencing, that stuff's tough.
I have a couple thoughts just based on my experience with both online taxonomies and posting on AO3.
Firstly, with regards to point 1: it is technically correct, of course, but I think it's lacking in understanding of what a tag actually means to a creator. For context, I'm one of the people whose women's hockey RPF fic is now categorized under "Men's Hockey RPF" (link).
A tag isn't just the text on the work; when I add a tag to my work I'm cognizant that I am categorizing my work for future readers to find. So while it's obviously true that the text remains identical, the meaning is in fact changed by synning. At the time, a bunch of us used "Hockey RPF" as a generic catch-all, and we tagged women's RPF with "Hockey RPF" on purpose. This context - a bucket of NHL and women's Olympic team RPF being comingled - was destroyed by synning "Hockey RPF" to "Men's Hockey RPF". So I'd argue that "Tag wranglers do not change the tags on a work" is false. You do change the tag. You don't change the tag's literal string text in the database, but you do change the tag, e.g., the string plus its meaning at the time when I used it, because the meaning is derived from the tag's functionality. It's not just text.
Which leads me to:
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.
So, obviously this is true, but I can think of scenarios where it might not be true, like two fandoms for the same canon that were historically separate - different languages, different country-specific fandoms, etc. In that case I'd argue that the taxonomy should be leveraged rather than synning the terms, because those two groups may not consider themselves the same fandom. It might be technically correct to syn them, but it's not contextually, socially correct, and contextually and socially correct tags were supposed to be part of the point of wrangling.
It's worth noting that this complication isn't unique to AO3. An example from work: we would coach customers to set up synonyms for regionally different terms for the same product, but we also cautioned them to consider localization; if they were literally selling the same SKU but someone might use two distinct terms to search, okay, set up a synonym. But if the two terms reflect a meaningful distinction (region-specific parts that aren't compatible with one another), then you may not want to set them up as synonyms, because then someone searching for their region's term is going to get a bunch of junk they can't even use.
Also, though, this currently isn't how a lot of synning happens on AO3. Case in point, the wank wasn't about synning "Sherlock TV" and "BBC Sherlock", it was about synning Sherlock with the AMT tag. So I think it's important to emphasize that if you're synning two terms that are not literally, provably, objectively and contextually the same, you are performing a destructive action, "destructive" here meaning that context is being lost when the two terms are synned.
Secondly -
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.
I appreciate your transparency about where this impression came from. But I would strongly recommend TW and the OTW as a whole look into literature on UI/UX and taxonomies (just a random Google produces this link for example). Obviously I'm not a volunteer, but based on my experience as a longtime user of the site, there are two issues with TW's current understanding of browsing:
1. The actual structure of the data is not the only way to improve user experience. If users are confused about a metatag, the fix might be outside your remit as it might be an actual interface problem (surface more of the tree, make exclusions easier, etc). With a large and diverse dataset, the "perfect" taxonomy doesn't exist, and it can be very, very beneficial to take a step back and think through how users might accomplish the task at hand using all tools available to the org (UI updates, backend updates, and wrangling) rather than one committee's. Which leads to
2. It seems that wrangling leadership would benefit from exploring a few software development & product management concepts, namely user stories and user flows. Structuring your inquiry into a problem according to user stories/user flows can really help illuminate what alternate solutions exist (assuming people come to understand the AMT synning as a destructive and undesirable action, which - I hope so!). What I have noticed about wrangling's guidelines and processes over the years, at least what's exposed to end users, is that there is a very serious deficit of understanding of the problem from a user's perspective. There's plenty of documentation about the importance of internal consistency and correctness, and I get that...but, as a user, synning of tags that are not self-evidently identical is genuinely very confusing. And it seems like a hack, to me, compensating for historic inadequacies with search or infrastructure, more or less completely detached from how people actually use the archive. This isn't a problem unique to the OTW! It's the kind of problem that UI/UX as a field seeks to address, and looking at how other people integrate UI/UX into product management could be really beneficial.
(Sidebar: it's obviously not your committee, but I really hope Support is looking into automated workflows for some of this stuff - there is just no need to respond to all those tickets by hand, or even really to prioritize them for any response other than that the change has been reverted.)
Last but not least, again, thank you for posting this, it was a thorough and interesting read and will be a great link for people I know who are confused about what happened or how tagging actually works.
no subject
I have a couple thoughts just based on my experience with both online taxonomies and posting on AO3.
Firstly, with regards to point 1: it is technically correct, of course, but I think it's lacking in understanding of what a tag actually means to a creator. For context, I'm one of the people whose women's hockey RPF fic is now categorized under "Men's Hockey RPF" (link).
A tag isn't just the text on the work; when I add a tag to my work I'm cognizant that I am categorizing my work for future readers to find. So while it's obviously true that the text remains identical, the meaning is in fact changed by synning. At the time, a bunch of us used "Hockey RPF" as a generic catch-all, and we tagged women's RPF with "Hockey RPF" on purpose. This context - a bucket of NHL and women's Olympic team RPF being comingled - was destroyed by synning "Hockey RPF" to "Men's Hockey RPF". So I'd argue that "Tag wranglers do not change the tags on a work" is false. You do change the tag. You don't change the tag's literal string text in the database, but you do change the tag, e.g., the string plus its meaning at the time when I used it, because the meaning is derived from the tag's functionality. It's not just text.
Which leads me to:
So, obviously this is true, but I can think of scenarios where it might not be true, like two fandoms for the same canon that were historically separate - different languages, different country-specific fandoms, etc. In that case I'd argue that the taxonomy should be leveraged rather than synning the terms, because those two groups may not consider themselves the same fandom. It might be technically correct to syn them, but it's not contextually, socially correct, and contextually and socially correct tags were supposed to be part of the point of wrangling.
It's worth noting that this complication isn't unique to AO3. An example from work: we would coach customers to set up synonyms for regionally different terms for the same product, but we also cautioned them to consider localization; if they were literally selling the same SKU but someone might use two distinct terms to search, okay, set up a synonym. But if the two terms reflect a meaningful distinction (region-specific parts that aren't compatible with one another), then you may not want to set them up as synonyms, because then someone searching for their region's term is going to get a bunch of junk they can't even use.
Also, though, this currently isn't how a lot of synning happens on AO3. Case in point, the wank wasn't about synning "Sherlock TV" and "BBC Sherlock", it was about synning Sherlock with the AMT tag. So I think it's important to emphasize that if you're synning two terms that are not literally, provably, objectively and contextually the same, you are performing a destructive action, "destructive" here meaning that context is being lost when the two terms are synned.
Secondly -
I appreciate your transparency about where this impression came from. But I would strongly recommend TW and the OTW as a whole look into literature on UI/UX and taxonomies (just a random Google produces this link for example). Obviously I'm not a volunteer, but based on my experience as a longtime user of the site, there are two issues with TW's current understanding of browsing:
1. The actual structure of the data is not the only way to improve user experience. If users are confused about a metatag, the fix might be outside your remit as it might be an actual interface problem (surface more of the tree, make exclusions easier, etc). With a large and diverse dataset, the "perfect" taxonomy doesn't exist, and it can be very, very beneficial to take a step back and think through how users might accomplish the task at hand using all tools available to the org (UI updates, backend updates, and wrangling) rather than one committee's. Which leads to
2. It seems that wrangling leadership would benefit from exploring a few software development & product management concepts, namely user stories and user flows. Structuring your inquiry into a problem according to user stories/user flows can really help illuminate what alternate solutions exist (assuming people come to understand the AMT synning as a destructive and undesirable action, which - I hope so!). What I have noticed about wrangling's guidelines and processes over the years, at least what's exposed to end users, is that there is a very serious deficit of understanding of the problem from a user's perspective. There's plenty of documentation about the importance of internal consistency and correctness, and I get that...but, as a user, synning of tags that are not self-evidently identical is genuinely very confusing. And it seems like a hack, to me, compensating for historic inadequacies with search or infrastructure, more or less completely detached from how people actually use the archive. This isn't a problem unique to the OTW! It's the kind of problem that UI/UX as a field seeks to address, and looking at how other people integrate UI/UX into product management could be really beneficial.
(Sidebar: it's obviously not your committee, but I really hope Support is looking into automated workflows for some of this stuff - there is just no need to respond to all those tickets by hand, or even really to prioritize them for any response other than that the change has been reverted.)
Last but not least, again, thank you for posting this, it was a thorough and interesting read and will be a great link for people I know who are confused about what happened or how tagging actually works.