fail_fandomanon

http://awatson.dreamwidth.org/1248.html

"A statement I've seen around a lot is "Wrangling is not sustainable." It's a statement that annoys me every time I hear it because I think it underestimates the dedication of fans. I think it also depreciates the current efforts of tag wranglers by saying that what they’re doing is not going to be enough, that it's a waste of time in the long run."

But, but, but how is it sustainable? She doesn't bother to address it! She just challenges people to come up with something better. Somebody correct me, something better has been discussed on ffa hasn't it?

also, it's the usual "but we work hard!" argument: you can't critizice the system cause then you criticize their hard work and that's personally hurtful for those working hard. Which may be true, but hard work doesn't fix a broken system if the had work doesn't go into fixing the system but into trying to fix the results of the system.

and I think there's a big difference between trying to wrangle freeform tags, and wrangling the tags in the various categories like characters and pairing relationship.

DA

Yeah, more practical ideas have been discussed, but I think the conclusion was that the "better" ideas didn't allow special snowflake authors to ~express their ~creativity with freeform tags, and therefore wouldn't fly with AO3's somewhat flaky operating principles.

I was quite fond of the idea of permanently and with extreme prejudice banishing malformed or unacceptable tags from the system once they'd been discovered, with the premise that most tags would be unacceptable.

There was our design the ultimate archive thread, which had a lot of suggestions for tagging - http://fail-fandomanon.livejournal.com/34242.html?thread=156335042#t156335042

Plus the fanlore page has lots of links to our various discussions http://fanlore.org/wiki/AO3_Tag_Wrangling#Criticism_and_discussion_of_AO3.27s_tagging_system

It's always a little weird to read a fanlore page and see your own anon comment quoted

Yeah, I noticed that too. The post doesn't even touch on the actual question of whether wrangling is sustainable as the archive grows.

Instead, it a) announces that even asking the question is rude to tag wranglers (what?), and b) beats the same drum about expressing creativity through tags that we've heard before.

a) is patently ridiculous. It's not an insult to suggest new, more efficient ways of working. And a culture in which asking a question or making a suggestion is spun as insulting is just not good.

And b), oh, dear god. But as I said, we've already discussed the folly of tying your navigational structure to your creative exprsesion ad nauseum.

It is funny, though, that the post doesn't even touch on the question of whether critics are right or wrong about sustainability. It just dodges it entirely.

I think it underestimates the dedication of fans. I think it also depreciates the current efforts of tag wranglers by saying that what they’re doing is not going to be enough, that it's a waste of time in the long run."

But I'm pretty sure that unless the archive doesn't want to grow all this tag wrangling is going to be a waste of time eventually. That's not dissing the wranglers, in fact I really respect their hard work. I just wish their efforts weren't being wasted on a system that can't scale at all.

There's something very... Stalinist propaganda about how hard work is the answer in the face of all the technical and logical limitations of the archive. Like, if we just dedicate ourselves hard enough is going to be able to overcome some problems, yes. (However inefficiently.) It is not going to be able to overcome other problems.

Bulldozing your way through, rather than reassessing and trying to find best practices given your resources, seems like a hallmark of OTW management, and it's the reason I continue to refuse to volunteer for them. I don't want to dedicate myself hard enough to something that doesn't use my dedication wisely. No fanfic archive is worthy of my useless martyrdom.

I think it also depreciates the current efforts

I feel like this is a fallacy I hear a lot from the defenders' side of things, and I just don't get it. A friend has one of AO3's big tech people as a roommate, and I have visited them during Yuletide and seen her thousand-yard stare, I realize that people are working really hard at this. For me, the number of coders and tag wranglers I know is specifically why it's so frustrating: the impression I get is that the system is set up so that they are doing a lot more work than they should have to do. I have a lot of respect for the coders and tag wranglers who are having to serve on the front lines of AO3's War On Practicality, and I have no doubt whatsoever that they're working really hard and doing a great job with what they've got. But those last few words there are the key -- with what they've got.

Don't the inefficiencies and the lack of scalability mean more work for coders, tag wranglers, etc., in the long run, and perhaps much more frustrating work, as well? Putting a band-aid on someone isn't a particularly huge task, but if you're putting them over a bullet wound, and you've got to change them as necessary, you're going to end up spending a lot of time and resources on a problem that needs serious medical treatment. At the same time, there probably are places where a band-aid is all that's needed, so that's resources and energy that could've gone to lots of them gone to one big problem that isn't actually going to be fixed by those resources and energy anyway. I know that's why I gave up on the idea of volunteering: it seemed like a lot of work that, quite frankly, shouldn't have needed doing in the first place, and it was frustrating enough to see the unwillingness to address the higher-level problems that were going on without it being my energy and time that was being wasted.

I'm a tag wrangler, I think it'll be a waste of time in the long run. And I try to push any additional tags into the "No Fandom" fandom if at all possible, so I don't have to deal with them.

I'd feel more appreciated if they actually did something about the whole thing, instead of claiming my efforts are depreciated. Because the former could ease my work load, while the later still leaves me with the fucking messed up tags the users come up with or use "wrong", because they don't know better.

Calling the Additional Tags Additional Tags instead of Freeforms behind the scenes, so the coders and wranglers talk about freeforms even in public, would be a start. So everybody actually knows what we are talking about and doesn't conflate being able to put whatever you want into every tag field with those tag fields being freeforms.

"it's not uncommon for there to be wrangling parties in the chatroom, where a group of co-wranglers will get together to work on a tricky or busy fandom"
Actually it is uncommon to find anybody in that room. At the beginning of the term there often was a staffer, as the sole person in the room, but now it's dead unless staff holds a meeting.
I can't remember the last wrangling party. Talk occurs in the comments of specific tags or on the mailing list.

I also wish they'd at least tip ADT off that they are thinking about asking for horizontal tags instead of waiting what the search and filters redesign brings.

I also wish they'd at least tip ADT off that they are thinking about asking for horizontal tags instead of waiting what the search and filters redesign brings.

Wait, the desired end results of that redesign aren't being discussed? This work is in progress and you don't know what it's going to do? Or do you mean you're all waiting to see what the proposal for the redesign is?

/professional software engineer nonnie

Also a tag wrangler, also frustrated. I have no problem going through and fixing peoples character and pairing tags to make them more searchable, but one of my fandoms has 700 unsortable freeform tags (mostly of the "X is a sad performing horse and I wrote this on a sugar high lol" type) and I just have to ignore them because they're fandom-specific.

I actually have no problem with people getting a space to write whatever they like, if only we could just leave it there!

Tell me not to post this, nonnies:

Wrangling is not sustainable.

I don't say that to make wranglers feel bad (I happen to care a lot about some wranglers), but because their effort is in vain, and I hate to watch people who are working hard struggle with an insurmountable problem by working harder. They're faced with a Sysiphean task that will become larger and larger.

A03 lacks a controlled vocabulary. It lacks consistent finding tools. (In fact, it's in so much trouble, the finding tools are TURNED OFF.)

I'm sorry, but I just pulled up the front page and clicked on "fandoms". Under "Books and Literature" is a short list.
Harry Potter--J K Rowling (24072)
Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms (15813)
Arthurian Mythology & Adaptations - All Media Types (7061)
Lord of the Rings - All Media Types (4030)
TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works (3015)

This is horrible. There is no consistency whatsover.

Supposedly this is "books and literature", but I see that the first item is the name of a character, then an author. Let's compare that to the next item, which is Sherlock Holmes (again a character), with NO author, and "related fandoms" whatever that means, and then followed by "All Media Types", which tells me it's not actually the "Books and Literature" section now is it, so that's wrong.

Then we've got Arthurian Mythology and Adaptations, All Media Types, with no author listed. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess this is mostly Merlin the TV show and not Mallory based fic, despite it being in the Books section.

Moving on to the next two, and my eye is already twitching. Here were have Lord of the Rings-All Media types, which again, All Media doesn't equal books and lit. Followed by TOLKIEN J R R, which is a whole separate category and is an author, with the vague "works".

In a controlled vocabulary environment, you would have some teeny tiny bit of consistency in the list, but there is none.

Consistency would mean:
Harry Potter - J K Rowling
would mean that you then had
Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien

OR, you'd have
Sherlock Holmes & related fandoms
Harry Potter & related fandoms
Aragorn & related fandoms

OR, you'd have
TOLKIEN J R R - works
CONAN DOYLE SIR ARTHUR - works
ROWLING J K -works

You can't even list things consistently by title OR by author! You don't even have a consistent way of presenting the author's name!

It's either J K Rowling and J R R Tolkien or it's TOLKIEN J R R and ROWLING J K.

And why are there 4000 works for Lord of the Rings, but 3000 for Tolkien? That tells me that 1000 works are about the Silmarillan or his work on mythology, which strikes me as highly unlikely. Regardless, that's a whole bunch of inaccurate wrangling.

Since the site can't even decide whether it's last name or first name in its lists on the fandom works page, then there's no way to find a fic, and finding fic is the purpose of metadata.

Here you want Cutter's laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog#Goal

In any given system of metadata, the tags should function to make it possible to find the works in a given library. (By type, author, etc.)

If I went to search for a work based on "books and literature" (a category A03 appears to have chosen), my very first attempt would fail and fail spectacularly.

You've got Anne Rice listed in "Uncategorized Fandoms" and "Jossverse" in TV (not even Buffy or Angel or Dollhouse? Stargate all franchises) and I could go on, but my head is already hurting.

There is no way to find the fandoms in any kind of consistent way. Anime and manga is lumped together, presumably because they're Eastern-media fandoms, whereas Comics and Graphic novels versus TV shows are split out for Western Media fandoms. But when it comes to video games, like Final Fantasy, East and West are mushed together again. Movies' first item, in fact, is actually Marvel movies, which are based on....comics.

It's just a mess.

I recommend reading up on RDA, Cutter's laws, and the behavior of searchers.

/very cranky librarian

I am sorry, anon, I cannot dissuade you from this course of action, 'cause you're right.

Post it. People who are in library science or have been around library science people agree, and maybe not just in solely lurkerly ways, especially if there's a thread to comment on/debate in.

+10000000

Please post it.

Fucking co-signed, anon. Please post it.

Oh for some consistency in the category names and headers. And re-sort everything that has a title starting with "The" out of the "T" section, who the hell ever thought that was a good idea?

Actually consistency across the board would help, I don't have the link to hand, but in one of renay's posts they mentioned that the various committees didn't have standard documentation. Something that just made me want to weep, as that's pretty much the most basic thing for any org.

And then there was that post of jennyst's linked a couple of days ago, where in the comments it came out they aren't even using a standard code for the meetings so she didn't know whether or not she could submit the minutes with an aye vote from just the attendees or if she needed a majority of the whole committee. (And lets not go into the fact that she said that Robert's Rules contradicted their legal team. If that's actually the case, maybe it's the internal rules that need to be changed.) Something as simple as submitting the minutes should not be so complicated.

I was also peeved when she said that the Code of Conduct they're working on wouldn't have anything about attendence, particularly after we saw how low the figures are.

While I agree with everything you've said, is this a tag issue or a categories issue? I thought the tags were the "lol i'm so drunk" "John and Sherlock's epiiiiiiiiiiic love" tumblr style drivel?

Bless you in the manner you find most congenial, librarian nonnie, for your crankiness is justified. Also you have just helped me in the software project I am working on right now.

The problem, library!anon, is that all of these series tags you complain about are derived from different strategies for grouping related fandoms into over-arching tags.

One at a time:

"Harry Potter - J K Rowling" is a single book series, listed with the author.

Other book series (all of these are canonical tags) include:
"Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle"
"Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien"
"The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien"
"Le Morte d'Arthur - Thomas Malory"

When you have a fandom in multiple formats with the same title, e.g. Lord of the Rings, they get lumped together under "All Media Types."

The following are canonical tags for LOTR:
"Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien"
"Lord of the Rings (Movies)"
"Lord of the Rings - All Media Types"

The last tag includes the other two as subtags, and it's where a fic will go if you simply tag it "Lord of the Rings" with no specification.

When you have a series that gets redone multiple times with different titles, or has related series with different titles that people tend to group together, they get lumped together under "& Related Fandoms."

"Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms" is a metatag for a whole bunch of fandoms, including the following:
Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV)
Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century
Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Sherlock (TV)
A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman
Without a Clue (1988)

And when you have people tagging with the author's name as if it's a fandom, the way we standardize that is "LASTNAME Firstname - Works".

Thus "TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works" is the standard-format tag that absorbs somebody's choice to make the series tag for one of their fics "Tolkien".

It doesn't look sensible as a top-down system. That's because it's an attempt to take whatever tags users throw at us and impose some kind of organization on them. Sure, all the "TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works" fics could go just as easily under the specific LotR/Hobbit/Silmarillion/ tags...but that's not how people have tagged them. People have gone with "Tolkien" as a series tag, and all we can do (in the current system setup) is deal with it as-is.

They will probably tell you that the "all media types" tags are metatags with several subtags and not see anything wrong with including them. I think they're useful but I think it would be better to separate all the "all media types" tags out into their own section so they don't clutter up the book/anime/TV/video game/etc. lists. I think for authors with multiple works , maybe they should be listed by author with all their works beneath them (possibly collapsed?)

I think a lot of the inconsistency was probably introduced through Yuletide nominations, which is annoying. I doubt it accounts for all of it, though.

Buffy does exist in the TV category; the "Jossverse" tag is on the front page by virtue of being a metatag and thus containing more fics, since it includes ALL the Buffy fics, all the Angel fics, all the Firefly fics, all the Dollhouse fics etc. I actually think this is a huge problem, because it makes the top five fandoms in each category less useful and uglier by bloating them with metatags. Also I'm not sure why "Jossverse" is so special it needs it's own tag; a joint Buffy/Angel tag maaaaaaaybe (although why couldn't you just search or filter for both? And tag for both?), but aren't Firefly and Dollhouse completely separate universes? I also don't see why there needs to be an overarching Final Fantasy tag, either.

And why are there 4000 works for Lord of the Rings, but 3000 for Tolkien? That tells me that 1000 works are about the Silmarillan or his work on mythology, which strikes me as highly unlikely. Regardless, that's a whole bunch of inaccurate wrangling.

You've got it backwards. The "Lord of the Rings - All Media Types" tag includes fics based on the movies and fics based on the books. Only the fics based on the books are included under the Tolkien tag; the other thousand are based solely on the movies (or at least tagged as such).

Anime and manga are probably lumped together because anime adaptations of manga series are so common. I'm pretty sure that's how it works on fanfiction.net too, and they don't even bother to name manga. Comic books and cartoons are also lumped together, presumably because up until this superhero movie craze cartoons appeared to be the preferred medium for comic book adaptations. I don't necessarily think either is right (although personally I think trying to separate anime and manga would be a headache), but I don't think they're going to be swayed by this particular criticism.

Basically, I totally agree with you, but you may want to refine this because they are so inclined to dismiss criticism. You don't seem to be entirely clear on how the system currently works, especially metatags -- and that's certainly a fair criticism of the Archive, that it's incredibly non-intuitive and "fiddle around until you figure it out or wait until someone explains it to you" is a TERRIBLE philosophy -- but I doubt they'll pay attention to the many valid criticisms you bring up if they have an excuse to dismiss you as a random outsider.

Though I doubt they'll pay attention no matter what you do. *sigh*

I am suddenly reminded of the debates about the war in Iraq, where supporting the troops was conflated with supporting the war.

I do respect the tag wranglers; that's why it pisses me off when people waste their time.

*sigh*

Yet again, the response to criticism is "criticism is an insult to all the people who work so hard!"

For one thing, I'm not sure I believe it. I think it's likely that the "you're insulting me!" response to pointing out potential issues is an easy way to brush off criticism without having to change. I don't think they're that thin-skinned; I think pretending to be thin-skinned makes it easy to not have to do anything.

But even if it was true, you can't run an organization where nothing can be changed because any change or criticism is a personal insult! I mean, how ridiculous is that? "I'm not going ot address the question of whether tag wrangling (or archive coding, or organizational structure) is actually functional or not, because even asking the question is denigrating all these hard workers! We can't change anything, even if it doesn't work, because changing is an admission that someone didn't do it perfectly the first time and that will hurt their feelings!"

I mean, what? I'm a former tag wrangler, and part of the reason I quit was that I felt that wrangling was unsustainable and the organization as a whole had no interest in making it easier. I felt that my time and effort was being thrown away to shore up a system that just wasn't going to work. Saying that tag wrangling needs help would not have been an insult to me--in fact, the insult was the idea that my time was so cheap that gross inefficiency wouldn't matter, because there would always be plenty of volunteer hours to fix it.

Not exactly 'devil's advocate' on this, but another viewpoint:

Committee chairs (and even committee members) within an organization such as this, can't exactly go around 'in public' bad-mouthing the Board or other chairs. It's sort of like a Director of [something] in a big corporation can't spout off about the CEO publicly and expect to keep their job.

If an committee chair were to do that, it is likely they would no longer be a chair and possibly no longer a volunteer. They have to be careful about the 'public facing' comments that are made. It sucks, but it's politics.