Metatag survey results, part 4: Final thoughts

Previously…

In September 2024, AO3 tag wrangling admins synned the tag for “Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms” to “Sherlock (TV)”, shocking and horrifying Holmes fans of all stripes. After an unprecedented backlash, they put it back. (Or should I say…put it Reichenbach. /rimshot)

(Trivia: When somebody needs to dump a huge task on the tag-indexing part of the servers, admins will turn off wrangling-in-general for the rest of us while the huge task is being processed. For the Holmes reinstatement, “we’re turning it off” was announced in wrangler chat at 11:28 PM on September 4, and “it’s back on now” at 12:45 AM on September 5.)

A post on the official AO3 Tumblr announced that no further changes would be made to metatags until we had a committee-wide discussion about how/if the Fandom Metatag Policies should change. Meanwhile, I threw together a completely-unofficial survey to ask how people use metatags.

And now: one last post about that.

(The AO3 upload of this post is now the definitive version -- any corrections/edits will be made there.)

( This was totally open-ended, so I’m not going to try to quantify the results and give you numbers or statistics. Just going to pull out some common themes, with relevant quotes. )