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Tag Wrangling 101! Lesson 1!
Right! So! I am, well, as most people who follow my journals in any capacity probably know, a tag wrangler for Archive of Our Own. What with Yuletide driving us crazy (in a good way, honest! ;)) lately, we've been getting a bit more publicity. (Which is kind of awesome! Because lord knows we need more wranglers! XD) However, as much description as has been given as to what exactly it is that we wranglers get up to, nothing quite manages to sum it up as well as seeing the interface and the steps and the stuff that we do!
So... I've decided to make a few posts showing off! And I've just finished the first one!
I will be calling them... Wrangling 101.
If you have no desire to see the inner workings of the Wrangulator, please, feel free to skip this post. If you're on dial-up, and this will kill your connection... definitely feel free to skip this post because...
Well... you've decided to brave the post. I applaud you. In lesson one of Wrangling 101, I'm going to show off what we do to assign a fandom tag to a media type, and create a canonical tag for it, making the user-generated tag a synonym to the canonical. Screenshots and commentary abound!
We will start with the front page of the archive. Which is just the same as anyone else sees but with one subtle difference.
As you see, when you're a wrangler and logged into the archive, you get a special link down at the bottom which will take you to where the magic happens! :D
This is what you see when you click on that link. The first group of links are to the groups of tags in each category that aren't assigned to a media type (in case of a fandom) or a fandom (in the case of... well, everything else). You see that at the time that this screenshot was taken, there were 31 unassigned fandom tags, 1052 unassigned pairing tags, 4161 unassigned character tags, and 3962 unassigned freeforms. (These numbers all used to be markedly less, but... Yuletide was the equivalent of a tag blizzard, and we just got the okay to wrangle again about a day ago. They'll be dropping again.)
The second group of links are the mass wrangling links where you can go to access all the character tags in a fandom, for instance, or all the fandom tags in a medium. These are out of the scope of lesson one, so I'll talk about them later. The little bar down at the bottom... well, that's self-explanatory, I think.
Let's click on 'Fandom' and see what we can assign!
This is the fandom mass assign page. I clicked on the dropdown to show the mediatypes that we can shoot fandoms to! You'll also see some oddness, like the tag hidden by said dropdown that starts +psych"fandom":, etc. These show up on occasion, are usually archives of imports, and get fixed by the authors pretty quickly. Any tag that isn't tagging any works, isn't a canonical or synonymous with a canonical gets automatically raked away periodically so as not to sit around gumming up the works.
Here we see, among others, the fandom tag 'Sweeney Todd (Sondheim muscal)' Specific enough that we know exactly what we're talking about, but not exactly in filtering format, so we get to tinker! Yaaaay, user diversity in tag naming! It makes wrangling fun! :D
We could just select the ticky-box (WHOOOO TICKY!) and choose the appropriate media type from the drop down (which is useful when you want to assign a bunch of fandoms to the same media type... hence the reason it's called the 'mass assign' page). But I'm just showing off how to do one tag this time. So we'll go ahead and click on it and see what we get.
And here is the Edit Tag page for a completely unwrangled tag! The only information it has at present is its name and what type of tag it is.
The musical should be categorized in Theater, so we'll go ahead and select that one from the dropdown and hit the 'Save changes' button.
Yaaaay! It's now successfully out of the unwrangled bin and into Theater!
Now it's time to work on pinning down the canonical format for the tag.
So I drop by the tag wrangling section of the AO3 internal documentation wiki and check to see what the current guidelines are for the canonical naming of musicals. (All of our guidelines are subject to change at any time, based on constant discussion, and, yes, listening to feedback from the users. We want to make things easier to use for you guys, not more difficult, I promise! :D)
The guidelines say that the proper canonical for a musical is Title - Composer/Lyricist/Librettist. Well... that should be simple! ... But wait... The musical's full name is technically 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street'. ... Should I insert the subtitle? Wait! I know who to consult!
A quick run to tag wrangler chat should solve this sticky wicket! These things are so much easier now that the character limit for tags is 100 instead of 42. :) Yaaaay collaborative efforts!
Okay, back to the tag edit page!
I'll go ahead and put the canonical that was decided on into the 'Rename' field. NOTE: This will not rename the tag that the author put on her fic. What it will do is create the new tag, and then the tag we've been working with will be a synonym for it. So whenever you click on 'Sweeney Todd (Sondheim musical)' in the fandom field of a fic, it'll bring up everything tagged with 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - Sondheim/Wheeler' or any other synonyms it may acquire.
Enter the new canonical, hit 'Save changes'...
SUCCESS! It's now a synonym of our shiny new canonical! But how will I let the other wranglers know that the fandom is now in the archive? I'm not overly familiar with the fandom myself, and someone who is may want to have fun wrangling it!
And here we go... Tag Wranglers have an unholy fondness for...
Google Docs spreadsheets. This here is our assignment spreadsheet. It's where we keep track of what canonicals are currently in the archive, and who's wrangling what fandoms. Right here? In the middle are my fandoms. ... Although, oops, I need to update that notes section. I went through and did a bit of cleanup wrangling yesterday, so my dates are off. But that's not what I'm worrying about at the moment. Scrooooooooooooooooll dooooooooooown to the bottom of the spreadsheet...
... yes, it's a long spreadsheet... And add our new fandom! I'm not putting anything in the 'Wrangler' or 'Notes' column at the time being, because I'm not claiming the fandom for myself (anyone who wants it, though, can come and add their name!), and I didn't do any real wrangling in the fandom other than creating the canonical. So I'm done with that for now!
Just to doublecheck that everything's A-OK, I'll drop by the tag edit page for our new canonical...
... And voila! It's listed as the official name for the fandom, magically put into the proper media (because of the media of what we were using the 'Rename' function on), and the synonym is attached perfectly! We may now pat ourselves on the back! Yaaay!
ETA: Yes, I went back afterwards to fix the fact that the 'the' in the subtitle really needed capitalizing. Which just goes to show another immutable law of wrangling. You CANNOT screw up so badly that it can't be fixed. :b
.... And that is my first little mini-demonstration of tag wrangling. It gives you a general idea of the interface and some of the tools that we have at our disposal (TICKY BOXES! SPREADSHEETS! :D :D :D), and I'd be more than happy to answer any questions about anything I have up. (I'm fairly sure some other wranglers would be more than willing to chime in as well.)
If everyone likes this one enough, I'll probably have more similar lessons for such things as wrangling stuff inside a fandom. Characters, pairings, etc., etc. But really? That's more than enough for now. Hope you found it interesting! :D
So... I've decided to make a few posts showing off! And I've just finished the first one!
I will be calling them... Wrangling 101.
If you have no desire to see the inner workings of the Wrangulator, please, feel free to skip this post. If you're on dial-up, and this will kill your connection... definitely feel free to skip this post because...
Well... you've decided to brave the post. I applaud you. In lesson one of Wrangling 101, I'm going to show off what we do to assign a fandom tag to a media type, and create a canonical tag for it, making the user-generated tag a synonym to the canonical. Screenshots and commentary abound!
We will start with the front page of the archive. Which is just the same as anyone else sees but with one subtle difference.
As you see, when you're a wrangler and logged into the archive, you get a special link down at the bottom which will take you to where the magic happens! :D
This is what you see when you click on that link. The first group of links are to the groups of tags in each category that aren't assigned to a media type (in case of a fandom) or a fandom (in the case of... well, everything else). You see that at the time that this screenshot was taken, there were 31 unassigned fandom tags, 1052 unassigned pairing tags, 4161 unassigned character tags, and 3962 unassigned freeforms. (These numbers all used to be markedly less, but... Yuletide was the equivalent of a tag blizzard, and we just got the okay to wrangle again about a day ago. They'll be dropping again.)
The second group of links are the mass wrangling links where you can go to access all the character tags in a fandom, for instance, or all the fandom tags in a medium. These are out of the scope of lesson one, so I'll talk about them later. The little bar down at the bottom... well, that's self-explanatory, I think.
Let's click on 'Fandom' and see what we can assign!
This is the fandom mass assign page. I clicked on the dropdown to show the mediatypes that we can shoot fandoms to! You'll also see some oddness, like the tag hidden by said dropdown that starts +psych"fandom":, etc. These show up on occasion, are usually archives of imports, and get fixed by the authors pretty quickly. Any tag that isn't tagging any works, isn't a canonical or synonymous with a canonical gets automatically raked away periodically so as not to sit around gumming up the works.
Here we see, among others, the fandom tag 'Sweeney Todd (Sondheim muscal)' Specific enough that we know exactly what we're talking about, but not exactly in filtering format, so we get to tinker! Yaaaay, user diversity in tag naming! It makes wrangling fun! :D
We could just select the ticky-box (WHOOOO TICKY!) and choose the appropriate media type from the drop down (which is useful when you want to assign a bunch of fandoms to the same media type... hence the reason it's called the 'mass assign' page). But I'm just showing off how to do one tag this time. So we'll go ahead and click on it and see what we get.
And here is the Edit Tag page for a completely unwrangled tag! The only information it has at present is its name and what type of tag it is.
The musical should be categorized in Theater, so we'll go ahead and select that one from the dropdown and hit the 'Save changes' button.
Yaaaay! It's now successfully out of the unwrangled bin and into Theater!
Now it's time to work on pinning down the canonical format for the tag.
So I drop by the tag wrangling section of the AO3 internal documentation wiki and check to see what the current guidelines are for the canonical naming of musicals. (All of our guidelines are subject to change at any time, based on constant discussion, and, yes, listening to feedback from the users. We want to make things easier to use for you guys, not more difficult, I promise! :D)
The guidelines say that the proper canonical for a musical is Title - Composer/Lyricist/Librettist. Well... that should be simple! ... But wait... The musical's full name is technically 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street'. ... Should I insert the subtitle? Wait! I know who to consult!
A quick run to tag wrangler chat should solve this sticky wicket! These things are so much easier now that the character limit for tags is 100 instead of 42. :) Yaaaay collaborative efforts!
Okay, back to the tag edit page!
I'll go ahead and put the canonical that was decided on into the 'Rename' field. NOTE: This will not rename the tag that the author put on her fic. What it will do is create the new tag, and then the tag we've been working with will be a synonym for it. So whenever you click on 'Sweeney Todd (Sondheim musical)' in the fandom field of a fic, it'll bring up everything tagged with 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - Sondheim/Wheeler' or any other synonyms it may acquire.
Enter the new canonical, hit 'Save changes'...
SUCCESS! It's now a synonym of our shiny new canonical! But how will I let the other wranglers know that the fandom is now in the archive? I'm not overly familiar with the fandom myself, and someone who is may want to have fun wrangling it!
And here we go... Tag Wranglers have an unholy fondness for...
Google Docs spreadsheets. This here is our assignment spreadsheet. It's where we keep track of what canonicals are currently in the archive, and who's wrangling what fandoms. Right here? In the middle are my fandoms. ... Although, oops, I need to update that notes section. I went through and did a bit of cleanup wrangling yesterday, so my dates are off. But that's not what I'm worrying about at the moment. Scrooooooooooooooooll dooooooooooown to the bottom of the spreadsheet...
... yes, it's a long spreadsheet... And add our new fandom! I'm not putting anything in the 'Wrangler' or 'Notes' column at the time being, because I'm not claiming the fandom for myself (anyone who wants it, though, can come and add their name!), and I didn't do any real wrangling in the fandom other than creating the canonical. So I'm done with that for now!
Just to doublecheck that everything's A-OK, I'll drop by the tag edit page for our new canonical...
... And voila! It's listed as the official name for the fandom, magically put into the proper media (because of the media of what we were using the 'Rename' function on), and the synonym is attached perfectly! We may now pat ourselves on the back! Yaaay!
ETA: Yes, I went back afterwards to fix the fact that the 'the' in the subtitle really needed capitalizing. Which just goes to show another immutable law of wrangling. You CANNOT screw up so badly that it can't be fixed. :b
.... And that is my first little mini-demonstration of tag wrangling. It gives you a general idea of the interface and some of the tools that we have at our disposal (TICKY BOXES! SPREADSHEETS! :D :D :D), and I'd be more than happy to answer any questions about anything I have up. (I'm fairly sure some other wranglers would be more than willing to chime in as well.)
If everyone likes this one enough, I'll probably have more similar lessons for such things as wrangling stuff inside a fandom. Characters, pairings, etc., etc. But really? That's more than enough for now. Hope you found it interesting! :D
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(I'm going to import all my fortycakes stuff as soon as I can get onto a computer - it's doable on my phone, but if the original fic was 5000+ characters long, the end gets cut off. My phone's weird.)
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And yes, I am in favor of as much of the fun crack from fortycakes getting on AO3 as possible. I may be biased, though. :b
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In fact, everything I've posted so far has been either Superdictionary fic, girlslash or transfic - three things the world needs more of.
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ETA: .... and that did not take long. Wait 'til you see Sunday's prompt. :D
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terriblewonderful XD