Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2013-06-10 06:34 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2013-06-10 06:34 pm
[ SECRET POST #2351 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2350 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 113 secrets from Secret Submission Post #336.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
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(Anonymous) 2013-06-10 11:45 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
General: Use the Tag Search to find tags you're curious about. Each tag's page shows things like what category it's in and what tags are related to it.
Fandom: Use the most specific tags possible. Don't use a metatag when you're already using one of its subtags. For example, if your fic is tagged "Elementary (TV)", you don't need to tag it "Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms". It will already show up in that listing anyway.
Character: Full names, in the order of the original canon language (so Jack Sheppard, but Tsukino Usagi).
If they have a generic name that is shared by characters in other fandoms, the tag will need some kind of disambiguation to make it specific to your fandom. You can see some examples on the tag for "Beast".
Pairings: Full names, in alphabetical order by family name (so, Jack Sheppard/Tsukino Usagi).
If there's a generic character from the same fandom as the other character(s), no need to disambiguate (e.g. "Aziraphale/Crowley"). If all characters are generic, but in the same fandom, you only need to disambiguate once (e.g. "Ace/Gary (Ambiguously Gay Duo)"). Otherwise, disambiguate all the generic characters (e.g. "Ace (Ambiguously Gay Duo)/Crowley (Supernatural)/Tsukino Usagi").
Freeforms: Use them for tropes ("Cuddling", "Amnesia"), kinks ("Breathplay", "Bondage"), extra information about characters ("Drunk Tony Stark", "Awesome Toph Bei Fong") or pairings ("Past Jim Kirk/Spock"), and anything else your fic contains that you think people might be looking for.
If there doesn't seem to be an existing canonical for a trope you want, check the tag search. Maybe there's an existing tag for a synonym that would work just as well. For example, "anxiety attacks" is not a canonical tag, but with a little poking around I discovered that "Panic Attacks" and "Anxiety Disorder" both are.
Other: Don't make your freeforms long and rambly and meandering. If you want to say "This was inspired by a really cute thing my cat did, she was sitting on the couch and then fell off, it was hilarious," put it in the summary or author's notes.
Don't combine two ideas into one tag. Separate your tags with commas. That seems like it should be obvious, but we get a lot of tags like "character: tony and bruce and steve" or "Madoka. Homura. Sayaka.", and those just can't be sorted. And we're not allowed to let users know when they've created a Frankentag like that.
I've been wrangling for a little over a year, and IME if every user did all of the above, 75% of the effort would be pre-emptively taken care of.
Obligatory disclaimer: none of this is required. You can of course ignore it completely, and tag however you want.
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And if you're posting a new work and click the "?" icon next to any of the tag categories, you'll get a couple of tips for that category. The one on relationships mentions the preference for full names (although not the alphabetical-order part, unfortunately).
As for why there isn't a simple page addressed to users that lays out the things I just laid out...it's because the AO3 administration is Very Deeply Committed to not [appearing to be] telling users how to tag.
So any suggestion that skirts that line is shut down as a matter of principle. Doesn't matter if it would add any convenience or utility; doesn't make a difference if a significant amount of users want it. The answer is always "We can't do that without rewriting our founding principles, which is never going to happen." (Just making the wrangler guidelines public was a matter of internal debate -- there was concern that it might be seen as "pressuring" users to tag in accordance with the guidelines. That's the kind of atmosphere any tag-policy discussion has to happen in.)
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And that...really sucks. Why get tag-wranglers in the first place if you're just going to try to not regulate tagging? It's like a doctor treating a patient for a heart attack after not telling them to stop smoking and start exercising and eating better. If you can prevent the problem in the first place, and you are willing to put in the effort to solve the problem afterwards, why not go with 'preventing it in the first place'?
/rant
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*headdesks*
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I'm really baffled by the underlying 'philosophy' here (and it sounds like I'm not alone in that?) Would the administration prefer that tag wrangling be totally silent/invisible? Because if the point is that people shouldn't feel bad about their tag choices, then reading about how we are doing it wrong even though we were never told the correct way to do it is upsetting, too. (I've also been told tag wrangling doesn't actually mean things are 'wrong' but I have a hard time knowing how else to interpret it; at the very least, there's a preferred approach that the administration wants to treat as semi-secret information. WTH?)
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(Anonymous) 2013-06-11 03:06 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
And there are lots of reasons to love the AO3, no question!
But completely uncontrolled tags, the way they're being used now, are not a goldmine for metadata. If you have a hundred different strings all expressing the same concept, but not in standardized or easily-searchable words, there's no way to get any useful metadata out of that except to go through by hand and manually link everything by meaning.
Yi and Chan (2009) did something similar for Delicious tags, where they tried to come up with an automated way of analyzing the tags on 4,552 websites. They started by limiting their analysis to "the subset of all the tags that were employed by at least two different people for the same web pages" (877). That got them down to 409 tags -- which were still not easy to analyze, and some of the shortcuts they took make my teeth itch a little. Including everybody's totally idiosyncratic individual tags would have made the data unmanageable.
The AO3 may be run by academics, but it sure isn't run by library scientists.
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(Anonymous) 2013-06-13 11:07 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-06-11 12:51 am (UTC)(link)This is a good point. There aren't really any guidelines that explain how authors should tag on AO3, which is a shame, really. As a tag wrangler, this is how I would prefer people would tag. You don't have to tag this way, of course, and there are times when you shouldn't. These are just my personal preferences, to make my life easier.
1) Check to see if there's already a freeform tag to cover what you want to say. So, if you want to tag your fic as "Fluffy Angst", try searching on AO3 to see if this is already a canonical tag. You can do that by first going to the metatags, which would be "Angst" and "Fluff". (Since the thought "Cracky Angst" is more specific, but still related to Angst and Crack.) Tags are formatted like this:
http://archiveofourown.org/tags/tagname
Question marks are this: *q*
Slashes are this: *s*
There are always spaces between the dashes if they are used in a tag. Spaces are written as %20. So the tag "AO3 Tags - Freeform" would be written out as: http://archiveofourown.org/tags/AO3%20Tags%20-%20Freeform
The search option on AO3 is pretty terrible, so your best option is to Google search it (site:archiveofourown.org tagname), or just try writing it out in the address bar.
So you would go to: http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Angst, to see if there's a Fluffy Angst tag subtagged under it. So now you're at the tag page, and you see the tag Fluff and Angst. That fits, so you use that.
2) If there is no freeform for your tag, feel free to create one. But try to make sure that it fits the structure. Again, see the Angst metatag. You can see that the various subtags are generally formatted like this: "Angst and X". Angst and Humor. Angst and Feels. Angst and Romance. Angst and Porn. You get the point. So let's say you wanted to tag your fic with "Cracky Angst". Instead of tagging it like that, you'd tag it as "Angst and Crack". That way, if it eventually passed the Rule of Three, it would be really easy to canonize. For example, in our Dubious Consent tag, we recently canonized Mildly Dubious Consent as a subtag under it, as a complement to our other subtag, Extremely Dubious Consent. Now we had to hunt down all the tags that said things like "consent is mildly dubious", "very very mild dub-con", "mild dub-con so if you're triggered by that don't read", "dub-con (but very mild)". If people had just used "Mildly Dubious Consent" -- which fit well with our other tag "Extremely Dubious Consent" -- it would've been a lot simpler. I mean, come on. What's the point of tagging your fic as "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANGST" or "aaaaaaaangst" or "Aaaaaaangst" or "Aaaaannnnngggggsssssttttttt!!!" instead of just "Angst"? (Those are all real tags, by the way.)
3) Make your tags about the fic, and not about you. This is the one that gives me the most headaches. I mean, I can pretty easily syn "OMG ANGST ANGST ANGST" and "SO MUCH AAAAANNNNGGGSSSTTT OMGGG" to "Angst". But tags that concern the author are harder. Do you canonize the tag "The Author Regrets Nothing"? Why? Why not? Does it help out the people who are searching for the fic? Is this problematic because it doesn't include artists, podficcers, vidders, et cetera? Should it become a canonical? What should it be subtagged (or metatagged) under? Do we have the right to police other people's self-expression by canonizing their personal feelings and making them searchable? What value does this tag have? What about the metatag "AO3 Tags - Freeform"? This tag includes useful tags as its subs, such as "Other Additional Tags to Be Added" and "Tags Contain Spoilers", but also the tags "How Do I Tag" and "I'm Bad At Tagging". These tags aren't very useful to the readers. Shouldn't tags be of use to the readers? Or should they be more independent, in order to reflect what people are trying to say? Are tags for the readers? Or for the writers? (Sure as hell not for the tag wranglers, though.)
What about tags that say things like "I had so much fun writing this", "I LOVE SHERLOCK SO MUCH", "I REGRET NOTHING", I, I, I, I, I? Are we lending legitimacy to these tags by synning and canonizing them? Or is this problematic? (Oh, the problematics.)
4) Make sure your tags make sense independent of each other. There are people who use tags like they're phrases in a sentence. Like this (I just made this up): #Stiles is so handsome #also he's sparkly #like a vampire #or something. You see how each tag depends on the ones around it for context? So if we get three or more tags that say something like "Or Something", do we canonize it? What thought does it convey? There are currently more than 20 works using the "or something" tag, as well as 8 works using the "or something like that" tag. They don't make much sense by themselves; not like the tag "Angst". If they did make sense, we probably would have canonized it a long time ago. Do we canonize? Should we canonize? What about the "or not" tag? Again, we would've canonized it long time ago if it were a tag that made sense. If we canonize it, what about tags like "Could Be Read as Romance or Not", which make sense on their own? Do we subtag them under the "Or Not" metatag? Or is the metatag actually useful, and should we include it? So should we just let a bunch of "X Or Not" canonical freeforms drift around without having one metatag anchoring them? Is this another case of a tag wrangler prioritizing hir needs for organization over the needs of the creator's self-expression or the reader's needs for searching (which is not allowed)?
I'm going off on a tangent here, but basically -- the fic tags should be about the fic. If you want to talk about the process of writing it, how you feel about it, feel free. Just please keep it in your author's notes.
4) Read the AO3 tag wrangling guidelines. http://archiveofourown.org/archive_faqs. They should answer questions such as how to write character names, how to write various characters in pairings, et cetera. The tag wranglers themselves use it when we wrangle.
Really, this is partly AO3's fault, because it's so opaque when it comes to discourse. When I joined the tag wrangling team, they made me agree to a statement. Basically, it's not allowed -- or at least heavily frowned upon -- to talk about what goes on during tag wrangling. According to them, it's to protect people's privacy (because some people use their legal names as tag wranglers) and so that whatever we say isn't misinterpreted to be what the AO3 says. We're supposed to be this unified front.
That goes double for contentious issues, like the issue of changing tags themselves. That issue is a huge no-no. Apparently someone brings it up on the mailing list once in a blue moon, and the answer is always "No, we can't do that." Well, why not? Why can't we? The answer is always that tags are part of a creator's self-expression, and we can't police them. (This usually includes the word "problematic".) Who agreed to this? I sure as hell didn't.
So now we have all these random freeforms drifting around. They all convey the same general thought, but they're all worded very drastically different from each other. Sure, we could sort through the tens of thousands (I'm not even kidding) of freeform tags to find the three or so that fit the same general concept and canonize them under one tag. But by then, we're generally too fucking exhausted.
OP
(Anonymous) 2013-06-11 01:22 am (UTC)(link)I'm not trying to be creepy or anything, but I just checked out your AO3 account from your Dreamwidth. As far as I can see, you're tagging really well. So thank you for that. :)
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(Anonymous) 2013-06-13 11:04 pm (UTC)(link)