coaltide | Don't Stop Coal Now!

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2021

Don't Stop Coal Now!

Tonight I'm gonna have myself a real coal time
I feel alive
And the exchange I'll turn it inside out, yeah
I'm floating around in agony
So, (don't stop me now)
(Don't stop me)
'Cause I'm having a coal time, having a coal time~

Main Collection Reveals: Sat 25 Dec
Madness Collection Opens: Sun 26 Dec
Author Reveals: Sat 1 Jan

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DC What part of that are you reading as fiction? Like some of that's got a different slant than I'd use, but the *facts* aren't wrong.

+1

The astolat connection is basically non-existent at this point, but the rest of it is true.

Which Yuletide mods are tag wranglers?

SC You know what, never mind. I was following up on the 199% overlap thing, with I am pretty sure is not true, but I don’t really want coalies pointing fingers either.

Wow, 100%

astolat and Speranza and Franzeska still get a lot of professional and fannish mileage out of their AO3 connections.

That's Naomi Novik, Speranza who has done a decent job of covering her wallet name and Franzeska Dickson aka olderthannetfic for those of you playing the home game.

cyrt:

> we know YT mods are also tag wranglers
some YT mods are tag wranglers, exactly two that I can tell are fandom wranglers (based on the list on the collection and what I can see in the OTW slack)

> we know the AO3 work environment is toxic and petty when it comes to people and their little kingdoms
not everyone who is an OTW volunteer will agree with this statement (I don't).

> and we know the fucking YT tags used to be canonized before reveals because it fucking made more sense to do it that way but some ridiculous pineapple with more power than sense decided to make it a rule that no YT fandoms could be canonized before reveals even when there were other works posted for them in the interim.
a) fandoms with no prior works have never been canonized before reveals that I can recall. As long as I have been involved in OTW (I'm a former wrangler, was not a fandom wrangler, current volunteer on a different committee.)
b) there is no rule that YT fandoms can't be canonized before reveals if other works are posted in the interim. Seriously, how would this even work? Do the fandom wranglers see a work posted in a small fandom in June and think, "oh, I can't canonize that fandom, it might be nominated and written for in Yuletide?"

Honestly I think a lot of the perceived problem is that fandom wrangling is a morass and there are not enough people to handle all the garbage in the bins that gets in the way and obscures the actual fandoms that need actual canonization (and not, like figuring out that this weird "fandom" is actually a smushname for two characters and should be synned to the show they're in, or that Winterblumensaat is an original work or whatever). When the bin is hundreds of pages long (I don't even know what it is now, since I don't have access to those views, but it was a lot two years ago and I bet it's even bigger now) things languish. It's easier to attribute the problems to malice but the real culprit is the commitment to allowing people to write in whatever tags they want instead of choosing from a pre-created menu, and not enough manpower to do the resulting necessary work.

Sorry for the tl;dr

DC

Do you have any idea why it only took hours after reveals to wrangle YT fandoms last year and it's taking days this year? What changed?

wrangler coalie below - I have no actual data but I think it's a combo of some of fewer wranglers than usual working on it, and technical limitations currently in place that make it physically impossible to work faster.

(I just looked at what's left unwrangled in Undisclosed Fandom; there's 23 fics left once you filter out the ones that have been wrangled, and except for one cnovel, it's stuff like "Top 5 Rat Movies I Just Made Up" and "Warsaw Mermaid Legend". This is probably all stuff that was skipped on the first pass for further discussion. And I actually do want them to take their time on deciding about that kind of stuff instead of just tossing into OW. Even if that probably is what they'll do in the end.)

I was brought on as a wrangler in 2010 specifically to help get all the yt tags wrangled before the collection opened. It was a thing. (IIRC at one point we had to canonize even before signups because matching didn't work without canonical tags - there are still 0-use canonicals floating around from those days.)

I honestly don't know if it was ever written policy, but for a few years after that stopped, people would write drabbles in yuletide fandoms just to get them wrangled early, with the result that they stopped wrangling yuletide fandoms between noms and reveals unless there were a Ton of fics. You're right this makes no sense and singles out YT! *That's why coalies are bitter*. I don't know if it's *policy* but it's still the same fandom wranglers and the drabbles still don't work.

I'm glad you've never encountered that kind of toxicity in your OTW work! I've had a blast as a wrangler and never dealt with it directly, but I would never deny that kind of cliquish toxicity exists in the OTW and the wrangling comm- I don't think anyone paying attention would, since it's happened on the *board* and required the whole org to work together to force them out. (It's also not an OTW specific thing -it's endemic in that kind of org - but denying it exists helps nothing.)

sc Also, the reason fandoms aren't wrangled quickly isn't a lack of people power, that's the excuse always put out by third parties for OTW slowness, and it's never people power - OTW has to turn away volunteers. It's inability to effectively use the people they have. In a lot of cases that also a valid excuse! It is a lot more work to manage well than to recruit well, and for a lot of things in the OTW, truly fixing the management problems would require completely rebuilding from the ground up, which would just slow things down even more.

But in the case of fandom wrangling specifically all they would have to do is put out a blast to the wrangling list saying "hey, we're looking to double the size of the fandoms team" and they'd get a ton of experienced wranglers who already know the rules and would love to jump in. They don't, because the existing fandom wranglers insist they're doing fine and don't want any help.

dc

That last sentence says so much about what's happening and has been happening for years now. I feel bad for the regular tag wranglers but I am at the point where I'm sure the reason things are as bad as they are is because a few people desperately want to feel special and needed. They want the asspats for having worked so hard to get all the Yuletide fandoms canonized in a week (a week everyone could have spent reading those invisible fics). If they'd relax their deathgrip, everyone involved would have an easier time. This is a problem with a lot of volunteer-run groups. That One Person with a martyr complex finagles their way into a bottleneck position of power, and the rest of the org is too timid to tell them they're making their own life harder, and everyone else's lives along with them, for the purpose of their own ego fulfillment when they swoop in to save the day.

Reading about the OTW's clique-ness and management problems really puts the anti-AO3 crowd that gets up in arms whenever donations come around in perspective.

The anti-AO3 crowd is so frustrating, because there are real problems with AO3 and the OTW coasts a lot on its reputation and fandom feeling -- but the antis can get easily slapped down with "censorship" or "you can't ask volunteers to do sensitivity work" and the real problems almost never get discussed.

Nah. The anti-AO3 crowd doesn't care about the management problems and cliquishness. They are just mad that AO3 allows incest, noncon and underage fic and refuses to engage with their campaigns to disallow that.

+10000

Antis do not give a fuck about organizational toxicity and inefficiencies. They just hate that it exists. cyrt is giving them waaaaaay too much credit.

I mean, I agree that the anti-AO3 crowd only care about scrubbing the content that they want, except that trying to talk in good faith about AO3's problems can get you put in the same bucket by its most rabid defenders.

dc Which helps no one. Even AO3's most fervent supporters dislike the organizational problems with the OTW. Yuletide isn't the only time of year tag wrangling issues get brought up, but it is the time when the maximum number of users are impacted at once.

I mean honestly "some yt fandoms take a week to get wrangled" isn't really that big a problem in the general scope of things? These days yt tags are a tiny, tiny fraction of the new fandom tags, even at the busiest part of yt season. And the fandom wranglers do a huge amount of mostly good work year round + which is presumably why management isn't going to poke that hornet's nest. But there are worse issues with fandom wrangling than yt being a bit slow (hi, video blogging rpf) only some one which are die to the cliquishness.

...says someone who wrote in an already wrangled fandom.

The problem with mine is that the main fandom tag and other related tags synned to it are a mess and need to be fixed, so there will be "questions" that need to be "discussed". Of course, they could just reach out to me for info on it but I doubt that's a thing. And so I'll be among the last wrangled when everyone has already moved on from reading the collection. Boo.

It's not that I don't feel for you, it's that the problems of two dozen little exchange fics for a week don't really amount to a hill of beans compared to the whole archive.

>> main fandom tag and other related tags synned to it are a mess and need to be fixed

Yeah that's part of those bigger, more important problems I mentioned. Sorry you're stuck in them. :(

If I was in that boat I'd double tag to the nearest all media types or megafandom for the eyeballs and then shift the fandom tag after it had been wrangled properly.

Re: To seek out more views or not to seek out more views...

(Anonymous) - 2021-12-29 02:04 (UTC) - Expand

Re: To seek out more views or not to seek out more views...

(Anonymous) - 2021-12-29 02:46 (UTC) - Expand

So pre-reveal wrangling was an artifact of a technical limitation, that's interesting

It's kinda the other way around I think - the original designers never even considered that fests using unwrangled tags would be an issue, of course everything would get wrangled as soon as it was nominated! But it quickly came clear that with the way people actually used fests, and the way the tags in general were scaling, that just wasn't feasible so they changed the code just enough that it wasn't necessary. (They still tried to do it in yt for a few years after, bit that was always a yt exception.)

But you still see a lot of that original design assumption in how awkward it is to deal with noncanon tags in exchanges (including unwrangled fandoms being invisible!) Honestly rather than whine about tags not being wrangled we should be whining about how they should fix the exchange code to play nice with unwrangled tags.

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