Saw some people curious about how AO3 tag wrangling works — as in, not the high-level policy decisions, just the basic everyday functions. So I decided to write some of it down.
Quick background: I’ve been a tag wrangling volunteer for the past 10 years. Never any other kind of AO3/OTW volunteer, and never in a staff/admin role; I’m an introvert, I’m not in this to manage people, just to sort things.
I wrangle a handful of medium-sized fandoms with steady activity, a bunch of small fandoms with irregular activity, and maybe a hundred fandoms at the “this was created for a Yuletide fic and has never used again” level. (The last chunk is more “babysitting” than “wrangling.”)
None of my fandoms are big enough to need multiple wranglers, so I can’t speak to what co-wrangling is like. Just the solo process.
For this post I’ll walk through the process of wrangling Madoka Magica. It’s moderately active; there aren’t new tags every day, but there are definitely new ones every week.
Here’s the internal edit page for the fandom tag itself: As I type this, there are 10 unwrangled characters, 10 unwrangled relationships, and 21 unwrangled freeforms.
In we go!
First, characters. Here’s the wrangling page, with the tags sorted by newest to oldest: In green: one (1) tag I know on-sight how to wrangle (“Mentionned Kaname Madoka”, becomes a synonym of my character Kaname Madoka)
In blue: one (1) tag I know on-sight that I can send somewhere else (“Class 2/3A (Negima)”, goes to the fandom Mahou Sensei Negima, which I don’t wrangle)
In yellow: eight (8) tags I have to look up. Starting with the oldest…
“Tanaka Michiko” was first used in 2021, but it hasn’t been on my wrangling page that whole time — it only showed up after it was used on a Madoka Magica fanwork in 2023. She’s not a Madoka character, or a character from any of the other works tagged on the fic. To Original Work she goes ETA: someone pointed out she is in Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete, that just straight-up did not show up when I googled the name! (This is why I'm not actually wrangling the fandom...) Moved her there now
“Anemo Nemo” is on a crossover fic with Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete, and a quick google con firms that’s where she’s from. I send her to that fandom — and, since it doesn’t have a wrangler of its own, canonize the tag
“Akoya Matama” is on the same fic. Same process
“Kashimura Sana – Character”, different crossover fic, she’s from Alice and Zouroku; I send her there
“Kashimura Zouroku – Character”, same deal
“Kashimura Sanae – Character”, same deal
The “Character” suffix is automatically added to the tags because another writer already used the exact same text in a different tag (in this case, freeforms). This is basically the only situation where wranglers can change the text of a tag: to put a “Freeform” suffix on the freeform, then restore the character tag to its original form. Average wranglers like me don’t have that access, though (too easy to abuse). You have to add it to the Suffix Swap Requests list, for admin-access wranglers to handle
Alice and Zouroku doesn’t have its own fandom wrangler either, so I go ahead and do that myself, for all three of these tags
“Miho Ayumu” is from the same fandom, and doesn’t need a suffix swap! I just canonize her
“Shizuku Ichijou”, same deal
And that does it for the character tags! On to the 10 unwrangled relationship tags. Again, newest to oldest: In green: 3 tags I know how to handle on-sight:
“implied madohomu” gets synned to “Akemi Homura/Kaname Madoka”
“Akemi Homura & Nakahara Chuuya (Bungou Stray Dogs)” looks like a crossover relationship that can just be canonized as-is. I double-check that “Nakahara Chuuya (Bungou Stray Dogs)” is the canonical format for the character — it is! Add both character tags to the rel tag — this automatically puts it in the right fandoms. Canonize it. Leave “Crossover rel to share” as a tag comment, so the BSD wranglers (it has several; that fandom has more than 10x as many fics as Madoka Magica) get a heads-up in their inboxes
“Akemi Homura & Frisk (Undertale)”, same deal, with “Frisk (Undertale)” as the other character tag
In blue: one tag I know on-sight that belongs somewhere else, “Cloe/Yasmin (Bratz)”. The tag itself isn’t a crossover relationship, it’s less than a week old, and the Bratz fandom has its own wrangler — so I leave it for them to handle.
In red: one tag I haven’t been able to wrangle before. Momoe Nagisa is a Madoka character, but the other character is “Blokkumi (Gigacolle)“, which belonged to a fandom that hadn’t been canonized. I check it again to see if anything’s changed.
It has! There’s a comment from the wrangler of the crossover franchise clarifying that this is an OC. Sometimes we create fandom-specific OC tags, like “Original Sailor Senshi Character(s)” in Sailor Moon, but it looks like the wrangler doesn’t think this one rates.
“Grace Chasity & Peter Spankoffski | Hot Chocolate Boy” is from Hatchetfield Universe – Team StarKid. It has wranglers, but this unwrangled tag is more than a month old, looks like it’s slipped through the cracks. I send it to them, with a quick note
“Arima Kana/Hoshino Ruby | Serena” is all characters who turn out to be from non-Madoka fandoms, and less than 2 weeks old. I leave it be
“Elisa Celjska & Tamaki Ui” is all characters who turn out to be from Madoka Magica spinoffs. (I knew Ui off the top of my head, but had to double-check Elisa.) One of their fandom tags is synned to the main Madoka tag; the other is a separate fandom canonical that I also wrangle. I add both character tags and canonize it
“Kim Chaehyun/Heo Jiwon” is another recent one with all non-Madoka characters; I leave it be
“expect like. Tsukasa/Jun or something theyre the 2 characters i could actually see together here”, same deal
And that’s it for relationship tags!
Didn’t clear the whole bin this time, but what’s left is Somebody Else’s Problem. They’ll only become my problem if I check back in a couple weeks and they’re still there: On to freeforms!
Starting with 21 of them. I’m going to do all the easy non-Madoka ones before I screenshot the page this time, because it’s so long:
“Adoptable Story Concept” gets pitched to No Fandom without any synning
“march move”, same deal
“Deltarune is also there ig” gets sent to Deltarune (Video Game), with a heads-up comment
That leaves us with 13: With characters and relationships, everything gets a canonical, as soon as you figure out the right format. With freeforms, we use “Rule of 3” — if a concept is tagged by 3 different users, either with the exact same wording or with different phrases that have the same meaning, then it gets a canonical.
For smaller fandoms, you can eyeball that. Once the fandom gets to a certain size, you probably need some other way to track things. There’s no official required way to do this! I use Google spreadsheets.
Here’s an extremely-zoomed-out screenshot of part of my Madoka freeform spreadsheet. Center column is canonical tags, left and right are ones that haven’t been canonized yet, loosely grouped by topic. They’re color-coded by character (in this section, red for Kyoko, blue for Sayaka, yellow for Mami, grey for the whole team): …basically, if “sorting lots of things into nice neat piles” sounds like your idea of a fun and relaxing afternoon? Volunteer to be an AO3 tag wrangler!
If it sounds like your worst nightmare? Do literally anything else.
(ETA for clarity: The spreadsheet sections don't mean anything official for the tags on the Archive! They're just an informal reference. The only sorting criteria is "if I get a new tag and want to check if the concept hits Rule of 3, what system will make it easiest for me, personally, to find similar tags?")
Aaaand that’s it! The freeform bin now looks like this, which is Good Enough For Now: Multiply by half a dozen other fandoms this size…tack in a bunch of smaller fandoms that probably only get 1-2 new tags in the first place…and that’s pretty representative of how wrangling usually goes.
At least, for me! Other wranglers with their own processes are encouraged to chime in.
The only common Wrangling Thing that I didn’t run into here was non-English tags. There are dozens of translation teams for all the languages commonly used on AO3, and a pretty simple procedure for reaching out to them with tags that need translating.
The last big question people usually ask is “how much time does it take?” — but I didn’t time today’s exercise, because “how long it takes when you’re stopping to write down every step and take a bunch of screenshots” is a whole other question. Maybe some other day.
Other questions? General thoughts? Drop a comment, let me know.
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