#tag wrangling

[tohru-oikawa]

Call for participants for interviews about tagging on Archive of Our Own

Hiya, I am looking to speak to fanfiction authors who publish and tag fanfiction on Archive of Our Own for a short online interview about the tagging system. This is to aid research for my dissertation for an MA in Library and Information Studies at University College London looking at the knowledge organisation of Archive of Our Own through the tags and tag wranglers.

If you are interested, you need to be:

Over the age of 18

Have published and tagged fanfiction of Archive of Our Own in the last 3 years (in any fandom)

Have some familiarity with the tagging system, including the role of tag wranglers (don't worry if you don't know much, i just want people who are interested in the tagging system really!)

If this is you, and you would be interested in taking part, please fill out this form or send me a DM/email (uczcmdh@ucl.ac.uk) and I would be happy to chat about the study and give you more information.

[ao3org]

Regarding Fandom Trees & AMTs

Tag wrangling is, on the whole, a fluid process. It's meant to be, because the way language is used and the way tags are used change over time. We're the first to admit that we don’t always get it right, and that we do sometimes make mistakes despite our best intentions. This is why wrangling decisions are not set in stone and are reevaluated periodically as circumstances change or as new information becomes available. 

In light of the impact that removing the Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms metatag has had, we have put that metatag back in place. 

When it comes to fandom metatags and fandom trees, there is no 'one size fits all' approach that works for all fandoms. Consequently, we have placed a hold on all structural changes to fandom metatags, All Media Types fandoms (commonly called AMTs), and fandom trees while wranglers discuss the need for additional guidelines and adjustments to our approach regarding these tags going forward. 

This hold will remain in place until tag wranglers have had ample time to fully reevaluate our fandom wrangling guidelines with the aim of making it easier for Archive users to find the content they��re looking for and filter out the content they aren’t. This guideline reevaluation process is something we are actively working on, but it will likely take some time to complete. We will update again once these fandom guideline discussions have come to a close.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

(From time to time, ao3org posts announcements of recent or upcoming wrangling changes on behalf of the Tag Wrangling Committee.)

[transformativeworks]

More Updates to “No Fandom” Additional Tags

AO3 tag wranglers plan to update a handful of "No Fandom" additional tags. Check out the latest news post for details: https://otw-news.org/3kh3reux

[thenerdyindividual]

So if you’re in a fandom like mine that has a shitty dad character, chances are you have come across the tag “[character]’s A+ Parenting”. I’ve used it multiple times, and it’s one that I’ve seen used across fandoms.

However, in the last weeks if you’ve tried to use that tag on your fic you may have discovered it missing. I recently tried to tag a fic A+ Parenting, and it didn’t come up. It remained on my other fics but I couldn’t tag my new fic with it.

I reached out to AO3 support asking about it, and this I was I received back.

“Hello,

Thanks for writing to us. There has been a general push to rename tags like this because the sarcastic use of "A+ Parenting" might not be clear to all users. For this reason, the tag "Uther Pendragon's A+ Parenting (Merlin)" has been made a synonym to "Bad Parent Uther Pendragon (Merlin)", and you should be able to find it in the dropdown under the new name.

If you prefer to use the other tag, you are welcome to copy/paste it into the Additional Tags field when you post a new work. Because it's a synonym of the new canonical tag, it will show up under the works listing at

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Bad%20Parent%20Uther%20Pendragon%20(Merlin)/works

Please let us know if you have further questions.

Warm regards,

AO3 Tag Wrangling Support”

Personally, I find this frustrating. It seems like a pointless consolidation that takes away nuance. For me, “Bad Parent” implies active bad parenting, or that the character’s bad parenting is going to be a core tenant explored in the fic. Whereas “A+ Parenting” acknowledges, with a comedic tone, that the character should be doing a better job. Or is behaving in a way that is contradictory to good parenting, but the parenting isn’t a focus in the fic. It’s passive.

Regardless, given the proliferation of the tag, I think most people are aware of its use. It’s a fun linguistic quirk in fandom that is now being wrangled away.

But you can tell me your opinion.

[facingthenorthwind]

Why does this have "- Freeform" at the end? and other questions about AO3 tag suffixes

Have you ever tagged something only for it to get a suffix like Character, Relationship or Freeform stuck on the end when you hit save? Do you think it's ugly and want it to go away, but don't know how? You probably can't, unfortunately, but there are a few situations where you can.

A tag suffix is a hyphen followed by the name of a tag category. Tags are either Fandom, Character, Relationship or Freeform tags. The reason that a suffix gets put on a tag is that the wrangulator (the part of AO3's backend that deals with tags) can't have tags with the same name, even if they're in different categories. As a solution, it puts the category at the end of tags that have first been tagged in some other category. For example: let's say that someone tags Evil Mark Donk in the characters field because that's where they want it to appear on their work (which is a perfectly valid choice to make!). Then someone else comes along and tries to tag Evil Mark Donk in the additional tags/freeforms field. (That field is shown as "additional tags" on the posting form, but the wrangulator and tag wranglers call it the "freeforms" because that's what it was originally called.) When the second person hits save, it will appear as Evil Mark Donk - Freeform on their fic. This will also happen if someone tags Evil Mark Donk in the relationships field, but there it would appear as Evil Mark Donk - Relationship. It's ugly and it's annoying, but the wrangulator is trying its best.

So how do you get rid of it? Sometimes it turns up because you've accidentally put your tags in the wrong field. Maybe you wrote a fic where you tagged Evil Mark Donk in the additional tags field, and no one else had tagged for it before you, which means it doesn't have a suffix and everything's right! But then you write a second fic, forgot to select the "additional tags" field when posting and now suddenly you've got Evil Mark Donk - Character on your fic. If that's the case, all you have to do is move it. But what if the first person to tag it wasn't you, and they put it in the character field, so you're stuck with Evil Mark Donk - Freeform? You can choose a different phrasing for the tag that wasn't initially tagged in a different field, e.g. Evil!Mark Donk or Mark Donk is Evil.

You may also have the problem that on the first use of a particular tag, you accidentally put it in a field you don't want it to be in, and now even when you put it in the right one, it still comes up as Evil Mark Donk - Freeform! The wrangulator has betrayed you, and you will be stuck with the ugly suffix forever! Not so, my friend. The problem is that even though you deleted the character tag Evil Mark Donk, it's still floating around in the wrangulator, which hasn't noticed that you deleted it. What you have to do is wait for 24 hours (give it a few for leeway) and a part of the wrangulator called "the rake" will delete it. After it's been raked, you can go forth and post it in the additional tags field, and no suffix will appear!

Unfortunately, most of the time it's going to be that someone else tagged it in a category you don't want to tag it first, and you can't change it without changing the phrasing of your tag. Sorry!

Sometimes, taggers will add their own suffixes, and tag wranglers are extremely curious about why. If you've done this, or something similar like put (freeform) in brackets after a tag, please let us know why! What does freeform mean to you? You are of course free to put suffixes on manually if you want -- it's a valid way to tag! We are just fascinated by this practice and don't really understand it. Please enlighten us!

For more information about tags, I've written some other explanations about how tags work, such as how to tell what type of tag something is and tag capitalisation.

[miaqc1]

SquidgeWorld Happy Post 😀❤️

Squidgeworld Archive. 🧡

A cool "Ao3 clone" with many improvements over Archive of our own .

More relationship types: Queerplatonic, Antagonistic, Non-Binary/Male, Non-Binary/Female, Non-Binary/Non-Binary. Also more archive warnings.

If you have a series of Original Works they can be tagged as a Custom Fandom. Here are mine as example.

There is less delay in wrangling a new fandom compared to Ao3. No more 1 month+ waiting for very obscure fandoms to get wrangled!

Languages can be added to the archive upon request.

And no need to get an invite to have an account! Now you need one because of spammers and bots.

I invite you all to join. Have fun writing. 😀 ❤️

Languages List Update.

Spanish (Español) – LatAm is gone due to negativity. I felt bad for having requested it in the first place. I was confused between writing and video game localizations since those use both Spanish dialects.

New languages: Esperanto, toki pona, Greek and Norwegian.

[abcwordsurge]

ao3 tag wranglers are miracle workers. I posted a fic with a historical figure, the first one to use this tag, and I put it with just his first and last name (e.g. "john smith") and within a week the official tag was created with middle name and time alive (e.g. "john william smith (1703-1784)". which one of you beautiful wranglers is over here googling the date of birth of all these historical figures in fanfiction

[ao3-shenanigans]

How to get a non fandom specific tag canonised? Is there sb I can talk to?

Im talking about the "reading the books" tag which has like 9 pages worth of material

Hi, good question! Ao3 has a team of volunteers called Tag Wranglers who: “… are responsible for creating and properly formatting canonical tags. They also attach tags referring to the same fandoms, characters, relationships, or additional information to canonical tags.” (Archive FAQ > Tags > How are tags organized?)

They do a lot of really awesome work for the fandom and ao3 community!

There’s a whole system for how they work attaching tags to fandoms, however some tags can’t be attached for various reasons, for example:

“Some tags are too ambiguous to be assigned a specific fandom, but are used so frequently that tag wranglers do need to make them canonical. On these occasions, we create a metatag that collects all the related tags together. For example, the tag Bianca could refer to Bianca from Dragon Age, Bianca Reyes from Blue Beetle, or several other Biancas. If a user inputs just Bianca, this is then linked by tag wranglers to the other Biancas we know about, but it can't be connected to a single fandom.” (Archive FAQ > Tags > How do canonical tags work?)

I’ve attached the Archive FAQ > Tags link here as well as the (tag) Wrangling Guidlines, if you seek more in-depth answers!

[rolandtowen]

Making official tags like "Captain America Sam Wilson" and "Captain America Steve Rogers" is one thing. SPLITTING the movies though??? Makes no sense. And I'm saying this as an active writer of both Steve Cap and Sam Cap fics.

[cinderella-ish]

Filtering Works in a Fandom with Multiple Media Tags on AO3

So, if you've been following me here for a while, you might remember my posts about trying to get the Fruits Basket metatag reinstated on AO3.

Today, someone posted in the AO3 and Fanfiction subreddits about this same issue, and long story short, some really wonderful AO3 volunteers helped me find a temporary solution to use until the wrangling team addresses this. The steps:

make sure you have a browser extension that allows you to use scripts (I use Firefox w/ Greasemonkey add-on)

add this script: Display Tag ID

Find the IDs for your fandom tags

Click here and scroll down to the "search within results" box

replace listed IDs with the IDs for your fandom tags

bookmark the search results page so you can return easily

Important Caveat: this will only include works in English. You could probably edit the URL to search in another language, but it will only be able to do one language at a time.

Below, I've linked some search results pages in my fandom(s)/fandoms I might eventually become more active in that you can bookmark.

Chainsaw Man

Demon Slayer

Fruits Basket | Crossovers manually excluded

Horimiya | Crossovers manually excluded

Invincible | Crossovers manually excluded

JuJutsu Kaisen

Skip to Loafer | Crossovers manually excluded

If you do this for another fandom, please reblog and add yours (or post in replies) so people can use it!

Notes: "crossovers manually excluded" may need to be updated from time to time, as people may write new crossovers!

If I don't link above to a results page with crossovers manually excluded, tumblr wouldn't let me link to such a long url (and I couldn't even exclude all crossovers without running into the limits of AO3's search function).

[hyperfixated-homo]

does anyone know if there's a way to make a original fandom into a common tag on ao3?

basically me and my friends (the sillies <3) have a lot of works on ao3 about our original universe, over 45 at this point. i'm trying to figure out if it's possible to make at least the fandom tag in to a common tag- that way we can save them all in one place easier. it would be nice if the character tags could be common too, but that's more complicated i believe

ao3 doesn't have support tickets open and i don't really know who to ask? is this even something we can do considering the "fandom" isn't even based on a fandom? it's literally just our own original works... but like, a collection of them. does that make sense?

[composeregg]

Some fandoms looking for cowranglers that people who follow me might be interested in:

Death Note

Naruto

Your Turn To Die | Kimi Ga Shine

Jujutsu Kaisen

Dark Souls

Final Fantasy XIV

There's a bunch of others like SMPs up for wrangling, the SCP foundation, Sonic, Total Drama Island, X-Men, Yugioh, some v-tubers, etc, lots of fun stuff and teams!

And there's always the currently unwrangled fandoms! Which include:

Slay the Princess

Code Lyoko

Ben 10

Bartimaeus Sequence

Bakugan

So many bands, fallout 3 and 4 and that one gotham show are unwrangled?? Touhou? Some Shin Megami Tensei games! Etrian Odyssey! The Home Alone movies! The video game OFF!

Applications are open until they get 120 of them or until September 18th!!

(They're also looking especially for people who speak Spanish and Portuguese! And Open Doors is also recruiting import assistants!)

[transformativeworks]

The OTW is Recruiting for Open Doors Technical Volunteers, Policy & Abuse Volunteers, and Tag Wrangling Volunteers

Do you know SQL and want to rescue at-risk fan archives? Do you want to help organize tags to help users find works in the Archive? Would you like to assist AO3 users by resolving complaints? The OTW is recruiting! Read more at: https://otw-news.org/2p9695zw

[colourful-void]

DO YOU WRITE POKEMON HORIZONS FIC ON AO3? LOOKING FOR HORIZONS FIC?

Perhaps you do!!! but it can be really difficult to find, due to a lack of a dedicated Pokemon Horizons tag!

Help others fin and filter your works by using the tag "pokemon horizons" within the additional tags section, or mentioning it somewhere in your description!!!!!!

For those looking for Horizons fic:

Using Search within results, you can narrow down horizons fics! typing "Pokemon Horizons" in there will narrow it down to fics that have "Pokemon Horizons" in their description or tags. By tagging your works as such, you make them easier to find!

You'll still get some non horizons fics if they have the word horizons in there, so it can be helpful to filter out non horizons chaacters like ash, if you're looking for just horizons stuff.

we still don't have a proper tag for horizons, nearly a year later, and I dont know if we ever will. but at the least, we can make it easier for ourselves. this doesnt require the tags to be wrangled, just YOU to write the name! lets work together to make it easier for us to enjoy horizons fic!

[facingthenorthwind]

AO3 tag capitalisation and why you can't change it

Have you ever tagged your fic in all Title Case and then discovered one of your tags has become all lowercase when you hit save? Or had it become title case when you tried to type it in lowercase? Does this offend your aesthetic sensibilities?

If you said yes to any of these questions, I would like to offer my deepest condolences. I, too, have had this problem. Unfortunately, you can't fix it (except in one very specific situation).

The first time a tag is used determines its capitalisation (unless it becomes a canonical). For example, I'm sure not everyone who tagged kylux au intended for it to be all lowercase, but the first user who tagged it capitalised it that way, and so it remains. This is because the wrangulator (the part of the AO3 backend that handles tags; yes this is what we officially call it) treats different capitalisations of a tag as the same tag, and isn't capable of having it display differently in different fics.

There are two situations where capitalisation can change: firstly, it could become the exact phrasing of a canonical tag. This is what it's called when a tag becomes filterable and multiple tags that mean the same thing (called syns) get connected together and all redirect to the canonical. For more info, you can read this post I wrote! All canonical tags get changed to title case when they're made canonical, because the tag edit page that wranglers can see enables wranglers to change the capitalisation of a tag (it also allows us to change the diacritics, but not anything else). If your tag is a synonym of that canonical, its capitalisation does not get changed, only if you've used the exact phrasing that later becomes canonical (for how to tell what kind of tag something is, please see the post I linked earlier). For example, if I was the first user of the tag "obi-wan on tatooine" and typed it all lowercase, it will remain lowercase even when the tag wrangler syns it to the canonical "Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine". But if I was the first use of "obi-wan kenobi on tatooine" and typed it all lowercase, when it's canonised it will change appearance on my work to be in title case. Tag wranglers will never change the capitalisation of your tag in any other situation.

Secondly, if you are the only use on an unfilterable tag (which means it has not been synned anywhere), it is technically possible to change the capitalisation if you decide that you want to change how it looks later. In order to do so, delete the tag from your work. Then wait approximately 24 hours (give it a few more for leeway) and tag your work again. You should be able to now tag it with different capitalisation. The reason you have to wait 24-ish hours is because of a part of the wrangulator called the rake. The rake deletes any unfilterable tag that has zero uses (except if it's used in a tagset) approximately 24 hours after it's made. Notably, any tag that has been synned to a canonical does not get raked. If you want to check if your zero-use tag has been deleted yet, you can search for its exact text in tag search. If it still exists, it will be a search result and show (0) after it. If it's been deleted, it won't show up at all. It's important to note that just because an unfilterable tag shows up in tag search with (0) after it, that doesn't mean it will be raked in the future! These are usually tags in a tagset, which don't disappear. A tagset (example) is used by people running challenges for participants to have a pool of tags to choose from. There is no way to determine whether a tag is in a tagset, not even as a wrangler! You just have to assume it's the case if it never disappears. And remember, if anyone else has used the tag you're trying to change, it won't work!

So in conclusion: sorry about the tag that is the wrong capitalisation. You almost certainly can't fix it.

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Oooh Steph, random question incoming! What are your thoughts on tag wranglers? I personally think it's fascinating that people do it, let alone on such a big scale (because let's admit it, ao3 is ducking huuge)

Hi Nonny!

Oh what a fun question! I LOVE THEM, and they deserve more love!!! They work tirelessly to make AO3's Search function properly, and it's why I HATE when people "Tumblr Tag" their fics. It makes their job so much harder and tedious.

So that said, a reminder to all authors, DON'T "TUMBLR TAG" (ie. write entire thought threads) IN YOUR FIC TAGS. There are REAL PEOPLE who go through and clean up tags relentlessly. I don't think it's against the TOS, but it does discourage proper search results and quite honestly other readers because tags are meant to help people find content they want.

Save commentary for the notes section of the fics, or your Tumblr blogs! Give the AO3 tag wranglers cookies, blankies, hot choccy, and lots of love!! <3