[ SECRET POST #2351 ]

[case]

⌈ 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.

Comments

[erinptah]

Most of it is in the FAQs on wrangler guidelines. The wrangler guidelines on character tags include the things I said here. The only reason the page is so long is because it also goes into detail about all the special cases you might run into. (What if the character mostly uses a nickname? What if they frequently go by a secret identity? What if they're a fanon character, but lots of authors have tagged for them? Etcetera.)

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.)

[nyxelestia]

I was about to ask why you aren't allowed to let users know about their frankentags when I saw this.

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

[astridv]

(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.

*headdesks*

[likeadeuce]

Thanks for the info! Last time I checked in on this, the wrangling info WASN'T public, so it's good to know it's there.

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?)

[(Anonymous)]

Aren't the AO3 founders all academics? I'm pretty sure they're invested in archiving fandom history and shifts and the ways fandom itself changes over time. The freeform tumblr-style tags are a goldmine for metadata and there's probably already enough for dozen of academic research papers, let alone after decades. In a way, they're preparing the ground for fandom seeds and a ripe harvest down the line. *shrugs* It's annoying the way everything we do on-line is now useful info for someone but at least we get a pretty awesome archive that's not going to disappear because it's useful for many reasons.

[erinptah]

The founders/administration aren't stupid, and nobody's denying that they care about preserving fandom history and being flexible enough to accommodate whatever changes fandom makes in the future.

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.