fail_fandomanon

Any tag wrangling nonnies want to comment on the current working conditions? Is it worth getting into?

All my fandoms are tiny, so I haven't had to do anything with them in months. If you pick your fandoms right, it's very low-key.

The most annoying thing for me is having to follow a mailing list. I don't give a fuck about the vast majority of the issues people bring up. It's really only good for watching people get catty with each other (like hele and pocketmouse a few days ago).

NA

I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates the mailing list. I just skip over all those messages.

+1 from another lots-of-tiny-fandoms wrangler. It can be very pleasantly low-key if you pick small, quiet fandoms where you don't need co-wranglers. The list can be annoying but I mostly just skim with extreme prejudice - unless the subject line indicates it's something related to one of my fandoms or an issue I care about, or a general all-hands notification of new policies, polls, etc., most of what comes through is largely ignorable; lots of new-wranglers with "what should I do here?" questions, people debating how to handle some difficult character/pairing/etc. in a fandom that's not yours, fandom-up-for-grabs postings from people who are stepping down, things like that. If you're not interested in watching wank and chatter, I would suggest having the list traffic go to a threaded client like Gmail and only checking in on it every few weeks to skim for the rare important announcements...it goes much faster if you can zap entire chatty-irrelevant threads all at once rather than one message-at-a-time as they come in throughout the day.

Serious question, if you're the only one doing tags for an obscure fandom, how can people tell if you're doing a good job? Does the org use some kind of oversight or performance reviews? Are most people who tag a fandom also people who post fic in said fandom, and has there been any conflict-of-interest shenanigans because of that?

AYRT:

how can people tell if you're doing a good job?

Just guessing here since I am merely a wrangler, not anyone higher up in the committee food chain who might have cause to know what sort of policies and procedures are there if a wrangler isn't doing a good job, but...I'm guessing the answer here would boil down to "nobody is complaining". If support keeps getting requests about unwrangled/incorrectly wrangled tags for a fandom, and that fandom has someone who is supposedly wrangling it, I'd imagine somebody might notice after a while that they keep seeing people pointing out issues with fandoms that are wrangled by so-and-so, and the issues aren't getting fixed.

Does the org use some kind of oversight or performance reviews?

Not as a formal thing for wranglers, no. We work pretty independently. (And frankly, the day they expect me to submit my work to someone else for formal approval, do timekeeping of my volunteer hours, or undergo performance reviews, would be the day I quit volunteering.)

Are most people who tag a fandom also people who post fic in said fandom, and has there been any conflict-of-interest shenanigans because of that?

I don't know about numbers of people actually posting fic, or conflict-of-interest issues, but generally speaking I'd say that many wranglers are at least interested in many of the fandoms they wrangle, and that's totally normal and expected? It's a lot harder to wrangle something you haven't read/watched/etc. - Wikipedia and the like can only take you so far, and that goes double if you're wrangling something with the source canon in a language you don't speak. Even if you're not "in the fandom" as a writer or lurking reader, it's easiest to wrangle fandoms where you have at least some familiarity with the source canon, and one common reason I frequently see given when people talk about letting go of fandoms they used to wrangle is that they've lost interest in/fallen behind on the current canon.

(Speaking only for myself - I write very infrequently, and none of the fandoms I have written for are ones that I wrangle. Some of the fandoms I wrangle are ones I'm "involved" with, to various degrees (mostly just consuming the canon, occasionally reading fic or lurking on comms, etc.), but many of them are so small that there really isn't much of a fandom there in any real sense. It can definitely help to be at least a lurker in fandoms you're wrangling, because then you'll know if some of the weirder-looking stuff showing up in freeforms is something that's in common use or just one person being quirky.)

< DA

All the committee really does (maybe twice a year, maybe) is look at a wrangler's nav page that lists fandoms and the number of un-dealt-with tags. If that number is non-trivial*, they'll send the wrangler an "are you alive" email asking if they're still interested in wrangling and if they need help cleaning up their 'doms.**

And generally, they prefer someone who's at least an active reader in that fandom to wrangle, as they might have a better idea about when canon changes a character's name, large challenges that occur, etc.

* the threshold for nagging in a Marvel fandom is higher than, say, Cats (the musical)
** sometimes not the most diplomatically worded, I'll concede.

It depends on the fandom and how much free time you have. Some fandoms require checking a few times a month (or more if you're in the really big fandoms) while other fandoms only need it a few times a year.

I just have small fandoms. I check the fandoms twice a year, once before Yuletide and once afterwards. It's easy work since nothing gets written for my fandoms unless it's during Yuletide.

I have a few moderately busy fandoms and I quite enjoy doing a few tags a day. The freeform tags still make me angry, though, because 99% of them are useless and a waste of space, and I have to wade through them finding the 1% that need to be canonised.

I currently also work in a big fandom, but I find the freeforms fun most of the time. The only part that's not thrilling is that I have to check my biggest fandom every other day or be inundated, but that's just because we don't yet have all the tools we need to. It's amusing to me to watch my fandoms come up with tag memes and share them, and I love being alerted right away to things I desperately want to read.

To answer the OP's question, the current conditions are what you choose them to be. I used to wrangle tiny fandoms, then I decided I liked the work and liked have co-wranglers. All the co-wranglers I've worked with have been fun people with positive attitudes and not slackers. Maybe I've just been lucky? But you get a good sense of how people are by skimming the mailing list messages, so it's not like I didn't know what I was getting with each of them.

I recommend the job for people who like to organize things but don't mind if there's a little imperfection here and there, because there will be.

Why do you have to wade through them? You can sort by abc or usuage #. I do this a few times a year, then just wrangle the few that need to be canonical. It takes all of 20 minutes, if that, and this is with a fairly large fandom.