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Mini tag wrangling updates
Cool video: Using AO3’s data dump from a few years ago to build unreasonably-detailed maps of tags — characters, relationships, then freeforms — and how they relate to each other:
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Fandom synning annoyance of the day: Marvel wranglers decided to syn the “Captain America (Movies)” tag to a new “Captain America (Chris Evans Movies)” tag. (They also made a separate “Captain America (Anthony Mackie Movies)” tag.)
A lot of writers use specific movie titles as fandom tags. It makes sense to me if you want to syn things like “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” to a general Evans tag, and “Captain America: Brave New World” to a general Mackie tag.
But they’ve taken away the option for a “general Cap subset of the MCU” tag. If you previously used the general tag because you wanted to include the entire ongoing Captain America series, movies 1-4 and beyond, this goes “nope, that’s not what you meant, you were only writing about the first 3.” If you were following the general tag because you wanted to read about the whole series, you now have a feed that excludes fic about the Sam-centric movies. If you miss that this even happened, and don’t update your feeds, a lot of Sam fic will just never be shown to you.
…and yeah, I’m aware that I don’t, personally, write enough Cap fic of any kind for my opinion on this to matter to anyone! Which is why I’m not out campaigning for them to change it, just grumbling on my own blog about it.
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Wrangling annoyance of the day that we actually can blame on users: A bunch of wranglers did an audit on the tag “pinning” (currently not canonical, and not synned to anything).
Of the works it’s used on, 27.9% actually involve “pinning.” The other 72.1% are by writers who don’t know how to spell “pining.”
There are a lot of good reasons why we shouldn’t mass-email thousands of random AO3 users and say “hey, fix your spelling.” I get that. But sometimes I daydream about it anyway.
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Some actual progress with No Fandom freeforms is happening behind the scenes.
You might think we should be publicizing that more. It’s good! It’s progress! People should hear good news about wrangling sometimes!
But: if we make a celebratory post about “good news, we synned Tag X”, it’ll get a thousand responses going “wait, Tag X has existed since 2014, why are you so dysfunctional that nobody managed to syn it until 2024? Also, when are you going to get to the equally-obvious problems with tags Y, and Z, and–“
And, let’s be real, none of these complaints are unfair.
But: We have a process for synning things like Tag X now. This is one of many things where TW leadership has spent a decade holding out for the Perfect Process, and in the meantime we had No Process At All, which has built up a terrifyingly large backlog.
What if there’s an official public post about it…the post gets negative reinforcement…someone gets spooked, they pull the plug on the whole thing…and we go back to having No Process At All? That would be worse on every level. Nobody wants to risk that. We hates it, precious.
So, yeah. Positive things are happening somewhere. Wranglers are mostly not talking about it. For at least some of us, this is why.
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That pinning/pining example feels like one of the very rare instances where it'd be better for everyone if the spellings were corrected to avoid misclassification! Wonder if it's on the table?
(Also, as an archivist (and a writer), I'd be very interested to see the No Fandom tags synning progress, both out of pure curiosity and to see if it impacts some tags I've used or am interested in. That reasoning makes sense, but I do wonder if at least a big summary post at the end of (a big chunk of) the project is an option?)
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A few wranglers talked about how it could be nice to post generic things like "this week we've synned some lost tags to make X,000 works newly filterable." No idea if anybody with Official AO3 Posting Access is going to follow through on that, though.
To be clear about the scale, here...with the current backlog, at the pace we're currently going, "reaching the end of the project in 10 years" would be lucky! (The process is open to adjusting/refining, it could be made faster, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.)
If you want to ask about specific tags, I can tell you if they're anywhere in the official to-do-something-about queue. (...Don't even ask how long the official to-do queue is.)
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Thank you! I'll let you know once I have time to focus on fanfiction again. :)
Re: the renaming, I'm mainly thinking about clashes where it's mixed usage so the tag can't be synned to just one, because sometimes it's misspelled and sometimes it isn't. What happens to that tag then? Does it not get synned at all...? It's an interesting problem with AO3's hard line policy there, for sure.
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There are plenty of tags with mixed usage like that, and sometimes wranglers hack together a solution, but sometimes there's just no good answer to be had.
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Nods. A bit sad, since I do actually want to read about pinning lmao, but makes sense given the situation at the moment. Thanks for the info!
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There are a lot of good reasons why we shouldn’t mass-email thousands of random AO3 users and say “hey, fix your spelling.” I get that. But sometimes I daydream about it anyway.
I admire your resistance against the considerable temptation.
So, yeah. Positive things are happening somewhere. Wranglers are mostly not talking about it.
Congrats, and best of luck with it all; I'll look forward to the results when it's finished and ready to share!
and FWIW, I appreciate your tag wrangling stories and I enjoy learning more about the process (even if the process sometimes involves not talking about it).
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