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On Ambiguity
Oct. 28th, 2018 11:17 pmYou, posting your work to AO3: These tags are excellent, they are super-clear about exactly what I mean, and no one will ever be confused about my intent.
Me, a Tag Wrangler receiving your tags through the wrangulator: ACTUally-
#listen sometimes i stare at people's works for like 5 whole minutes #and still can't figure it out #if you use characters' full names in tags please know i love you
This is correct, except it’s not “a lot of the time” - it’s every time! We have to make an extra effort to go to an individual work to see the tag in context. Otherwise, all tags arrive to us without context. And if we’re wrangling hundreds of tags a day, we’re just never going to have time to check the works on all tags.
Even worse, “Human Peter” can (and has) been used by multiple people to mean different Peters. We can’t edit tags, so we can’t fix that. The tag will simply become unuseable. Human Peter Hale or Human Peter Quill, those are wrangleable tags! Human Peter, not so much.
This post explains the Peter problem in detail. (This one is funnier and shows the problem visually.) This post shows how the wrangulator works on the back end. And this post suggests how to make life easier for tag wranglers in general.
If anyone has questions about how tags work or needs help with deciding how to tag, my asks are open!
Me, a Tag Wrangler receiving your tags through the wrangulator: ACTUally-
#listen sometimes i stare at people's works for like 5 whole minutes #and still can't figure it out #if you use characters' full names in tags please know i love you
lurking-lucifer said: The Tumblr tags specify using characters’ full names.
This is honestly never something I considered before, but I’m guessing that - a lot of the time - tag wranglers probably see tags to organise/sort independent of the work itself, so it could prove confusing to see say “Human Peter” or “Mutant Keith” … the names are so common that it could belong to dozens of fandoms, with no guarantee the wrangler is a part of those fandoms either.
When writing character tags, it’s worth bearing in mind.
Not only will it make things easier for volunteers, but it’ll likely have the added benefit of increasing your audience, too, as people will have a more specific tag to search and use in place of one that could apply to several characters. After all, nothing more irritating than searching for x and finding y!
This is correct, except it’s not “a lot of the time” - it’s every time! We have to make an extra effort to go to an individual work to see the tag in context. Otherwise, all tags arrive to us without context. And if we’re wrangling hundreds of tags a day, we’re just never going to have time to check the works on all tags.
Even worse, “Human Peter” can (and has) been used by multiple people to mean different Peters. We can’t edit tags, so we can’t fix that. The tag will simply become unuseable. Human Peter Hale or Human Peter Quill, those are wrangleable tags! Human Peter, not so much.
This post explains the Peter problem in detail. (This one is funnier and shows the problem visually.) This post shows how the wrangulator works on the back end. And this post suggests how to make life easier for tag wranglers in general.
If anyone has questions about how tags work or needs help with deciding how to tag, my asks are open!
