Demure

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

As a tag wrangler, please tag with "Worldbuilding (fandom name)"

[(Anonymous)]

Sure you are.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm one of those tag wranglers from back when tag wranglers actually believed in curated folksonomy and encouraging writers to tag however they wanted because tag wrangling guildelines were always secondary to what individual writers thought would be useful to them. Some of us have just been too stubborn to quit and are still around. :)

There's probably less ambiguous ways to tag for whatever exact concept op above is going for but there's nothing wrong enough with it to be worth telling them not to, and as a reader who likes canon-heavy worldbuilding I think it could be a useful freeform if enough people tagged with similar things to force the wranglers to actually deal with them.

[(Anonymous)]

i appreciate you, coalie

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, but it is not actually possible or compatible with how the tags are categorized, and I feel you should be well aware of this. If "Worldbuilding (Queen's Thief)" is approved into the tag set in the Character category, no one can tag their fic with "Worldbuilding (Queen's Thief)" in the Freeform category. It will convert to "Worldbuilding (Queen's Thief) - Freeform".

But sure, go ahead and tell users to "force" your fellow wranglers to "actually deal with" tags, because you think they're all lazy or something?

[(Anonymous)]

Worldbuilding (Queen's Thief) will never ever ever be a canonical (or synned) character tag, and therefore is not a the wranglers' problem once the Sarlaac has it. It only exists at all as a kludge because the exchange code is a mess. There's tons of tags with the - disambiguation for all kinds of reasons, that's not a reason not to use a tag you want to use. My annoyance about wranglers doing their jobs is not about individual wranglers' work ethics, it's the way ten+ years of accumulated tactical committee choices have left the group's priorities fucked in a way that can apparently only be corrected by mass action.

It's entirely possible that there's very good technical reasons why exchange mods need people to avoid making that tag but speaking as a wrangler not exchange mod, it's fine. (And actually I can't tell from the mod post whether they want us to not use it as a character, as a free-form, or as either. Based on my ancient one-time tagmodding experience I suspect it's a bigger headache for the yt tag mods as an in-use character tag than as a disambiguated freeform.)

[(Anonymous)]

lmao this is incredibly aggro and not responding to what they said in the least

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not a tag wrangler and have fairly little knowledge of the back-end but I don't really see how "what individual writers think would be useful to them" is inherently better for its own sake. Some people will always want to tag a certain way, and that doesn't mean it's better. Any kind of top-down decision, including about tag-wrangling, needs to pick an approach and stick with it.

If I'm looking for worldbuilding-heavy stories in a certain fandom, I can search within that fandom and filter for the tag. This does the job. The idea of getting into a new fandom and having to search for a fandom-specific worldbuilding tag feels annoying and contrary to the entire point of freeform tags.

What is the benefit of this, beyond the sheer principle of "let authors tag how they want because that's intrinsically good somehow"?