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Wrangling Wizardry, part 1 of 4
Jan. 19th, 2013 12:54 pm(Glossary)
Wrangling has a lot in common with magic: it's confusing from the outside, it has a lot of rules, and you really need to learn it from other wranglers, not just from reading. On the plus side, wranglers rarely violate the laws of nature or cause a backlash that turns someone into a toad.
Rarely.
Anyway, welcome to Wrangling Wizardry. Allow me to walk you through a spell....
First, wrangling works with a database. As far as the database is concerned, all copies of the same tag are exactly the same object, regardless of capitalization. "Feels" and "feels" are the same tag. Also, if there are 140 uses of "Feels", they're all treated as one object. Any changes I make to the database will affect all copies of the tag.
In other words, if I cast a spell on one frog-princess, it affects all frog-princesses, because as far as AO3 is concerned, all frog-princesses are the same. A toad-princess, on the other hand, won't be affected.
Second, the goal of wrangling is not to make everything tidy. It's to make tags as useful as possible for people searching. Untidiness – ambiguous tags, tags in the wrong categories, tags that are inherently unique and will never be used by anyone else – these are all part of the way open-ended tagging works. They're features, not bugs.
Third, tags are wrangled on a fandom-by-fandom basis. Wranglers familiar with a fandom will assign it to themselves and organize the tags in it. If the fandom is very large or very active (usually over 1000 works), the wrangler may ask for co-wranglers to help them.
Next up, the magic powers of a wrangler...
Freeforms of the day: Frogs.
Wrangling has a lot in common with magic: it's confusing from the outside, it has a lot of rules, and you really need to learn it from other wranglers, not just from reading. On the plus side, wranglers rarely violate the laws of nature or cause a backlash that turns someone into a toad.
Rarely.
Anyway, welcome to Wrangling Wizardry. Allow me to walk you through a spell....
First, wrangling works with a database. As far as the database is concerned, all copies of the same tag are exactly the same object, regardless of capitalization. "Feels" and "feels" are the same tag. Also, if there are 140 uses of "Feels", they're all treated as one object. Any changes I make to the database will affect all copies of the tag.
In other words, if I cast a spell on one frog-princess, it affects all frog-princesses, because as far as AO3 is concerned, all frog-princesses are the same. A toad-princess, on the other hand, won't be affected.
Second, the goal of wrangling is not to make everything tidy. It's to make tags as useful as possible for people searching. Untidiness – ambiguous tags, tags in the wrong categories, tags that are inherently unique and will never be used by anyone else – these are all part of the way open-ended tagging works. They're features, not bugs.
Third, tags are wrangled on a fandom-by-fandom basis. Wranglers familiar with a fandom will assign it to themselves and organize the tags in it. If the fandom is very large or very active (usually over 1000 works), the wrangler may ask for co-wranglers to help them.
Next up, the magic powers of a wrangler...
Freeforms of the day: Frogs.
