doldrums addendum

[foxinthestars]

Also, as another tagwrangling complaint, it strikes me that you can say what you want to about what your values are supposed to be (in this case respecting users and their creative freedom, not privileging canonical tags, etc), but if you structure the situation in a way that doesn't promote those values, the words might not amount to much. With tag-wrangling, the structure of the situation is that the wranglers are made to do work --- sometimes cat-herdingly chaotic and confusing work --- whenever the users get creative; the structure promotes resentment toward users going outside the canonical tags. A certain amount of this might be unavoidable, but relying so much on manual wrangling makes it a broader problem than necessary.

Comments

[branchandroot]

And if it's really about /user/ control of their content, then it's even more true that wrangling should be automated and user-side. Users who want to use funky tags would, then, also be the ones to select which canonical, if any, that tag is linked to. And be informed that their funky tag will not be searchable if it's not linked to a canonical. Instead it's this half-and-half with the appearance of freedom out front at the cost of wranglers cat-herding in the background plus poor navigability. Which, indeed, does not seem to me to indicate a very genuine commitment to creative freedom, only the appearance of it. In my more cynical moments, I think very dark thoughts about how this sacrifices a lot of people in the background in order to curry favor with the user-masses for the few with actual name recognition.

[foxinthestars]

And maybe for the wrangling that needs to be done, give the users a convenient in-line comment option (this isn't canonical but I think it should be because X, this is what I mean by Y, N is a fanon/original character...).

I may not be well-enough informed to be that cynical. ^_^; To me a lot of it looks more like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, not facing up to difficult choices and realism and the impossibility of pleasing everyone*. Not giving users front-end control does indicate distrust, though, certainly. For me, the current system even failed at the illusion of freedom; before I became a wrangler myself, I felt that the autocompletes were prescriptive and didn't realize that I could go outside of them.

*Not exactly a tag-wrangling issue but something that comes to mind is the wrangling over how and whether to break out Asian media; as it is we have Manhwa/Manhua fans pissed off about being lumped in with the Japanese, and it was suggested that maybe we should just put it all under Comics/Animation and I'm sitting there screaming NOOOO because there's such a big cultural distinction there among most Anglophone fans and can we admit that our userbase is primarily Anglophone fans or are we trying to achieve a culturally blank space or what? I don't have the answer, but it's a case where you might just have to do the best you can and accept that some people are going to be pissed rather than promising to make it better some day that never seems to come or be much talked of...

Sometimes (speaking as someone who bristles at any pejorative use of this phrase) I do worry that I'm not being "politically correct" enough, like in the above instance, or raising an objection to canonizing a "Character/You" tag for character/reader relationships because it strikes me as threateningly presumptuous on the viewer, but then did I err by judging other fans' usages or what... (Yeah, just gonna wrangle my sleepy fandoms and be quiet...)

This may just be my own social failings talking, but I wish the OTW had a good old-fashioned message board where people could talk about this stuff in a more open way, and a certain amount of my "mleh" comes from not seeing that kind of clear avenue for social cohesion in this thing.

Sorry for talking your ear off here...

[branchandroot]

*grins* No, no, talk away. For one thing, you clearly need /some/ space to talk about this, and for another I do find the inside view very informative.

I think a message board would be /brilliant/, especially since that would be a really easy way to have a board for volunteer workers, a board that's all public, etc.. Really, just about anything that let people bounce ideas around without having to Schedule Meetings about it.

And that issue of categorization really does depend on what the archive is trying to host. I mean, if they really want all-nations, then they should divide by base media. Animation, Graphic Novels, Live Action, Novel, Game, etc. and then put each nation's variation on that media under those. So, comics, manga, manhwa, historietas all under Graphic Novels. And Sailor Moon, Kuroshitsuji, etc. under manga.

Personally, I think it's past time to also link variations to each other hierarchically, so that all versions of Avengers, comics and movies and whatnot, can be grouped under a top-level Avengers linked in something like a Multimedia category.

Navigation isn't /nearly/ faceted enough.

[foxinthestars]

There are metatags that link things that way and that appear under all of the applicable media (there is an "Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types" tag --- and even a "The Avengers - All Fandoms" because there was IIRC an unrelated British TV show with the same name and users' tags are sacred and inviolable even though they can't be expected to know anything about the disambiguation rules), but that's in the tags and last I knew the tag tree structure was closed off to users even for viewing and navigation purposes, which just makes no sense at all. I ought to sign in to my non-wrangler porn-posting sock-puppet account and even remind myself what it looks like (and maybe recommend people sign up as wranglers just for the improved navigation -_-;;).

I do think sorting by media/format and by country of origin as you describe would be a good solution, and I think that might be what was discussed as a "we'll get to it someday" type of thing. Maybe a message board could also make development look less like a black box out of which random punishments or rewards occasionally emerge...

[branchandroot]

*shakes head* Yeah, when people talk about "transparency", it isn't just org politics they mean. Because, seriously, how are people supposed to either understand or make reasonable use of the tag tree if it's not visible /anywhere/?