https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/32276
Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with calamario, who volunteers as a Tag Wrangler.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
As a tag wrangler, I work behind the scenes of AO3 to help organise the tags that users add to their works.
This primarily involves creating new canonical tags (i.e., the tags that show up in the dropdown and that you can filter on) for the fandoms I wrangle, connecting new tags to already-existing canonicals (i.e., making those tags ‘synonyms’ of these canonicals, a.k.a. ‘synning’ them), or otherwise wrangling the tags to their correct fandoms if they can’t be synned anywhere.
For example, have you ever wondered why tagging your work with something like “a lil angst” in the Additional Tags field makes it show up in the “Angst” tag, or why tagging “anidala” as a Relationship connects it to “Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker”? That’s because wranglers have synned them there!
If you’re interested in learning more about wrangling and the terms we use, you can check out the publicly available wrangling guidelines here.
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
It depends a lot on how busy my real life is! At the moment, I’m working on my master’s thesis, so I currently have a wrangling session once or twice a week, usually consisting of a few hours per session. However, one of the wonderful things about tag wrangling is that it’s super easy to scale your workload, depending on how much time you’re able to dedicate to volunteering – so during holidays and such, there might be several days a week where I spend all day just wrangling!
For a typical wrangling session, I’ll first tackle my solo-wrangled fandoms to wrangle any new tags that have shown up in the wrangling bins there, before taking a look to see if any of my co-wrangled fandoms might especially need a hand.
If it seems like there are not any new tags to handle, I might go hunting for concepts that I can canonise in one of my fandoms! Wranglers usually follow the so-called ‘rule of three’ (colloquially shortened to ‘ro3’), which means that a new concept must have been tagged by at least three separate users on three separate works. This is so that we know that there’s actually a desire in the fandom for the concept to be canonised – so if there’s a particular concept that you’d love to see get a canonical tag that you can filter on, get a couple of friends to make works about it and tag for it!
Sometimes, I might have different projects to work on besides my regular wrangling, such as a renaming project. For example, if a character gets their surname revealed in canon, wranglers might choose to update their character and relationship canonicals to reflect the change! This is a manual process that requires the wrangler to first create a new canonical with the updated format, then move over all the syns from the old canonical, and then finally de-canonise and syn the old tag to the new one. If there are a lot of tags to go through, this is a process that can take days, weeks, even months! However, I actually find renaming projects kind of soothing in their repetition, especially after having established workflows that help me get through them smoothly.
What made you decide to volunteer?
I actually first started volunteering with the Translation committee as a translator and beta reader. It used to be my dream to become a translator, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to both get some relevant experience on my resumé, as well as give back to a website where I spent (and still do spend) a lot of my free time on.
After a few months as a translator, I also applied to become a tag wrangler! The more I learnt about what tag wrangling was and the kind of work that tag wranglers did, the more it sounded like something I would really enjoy – and it absolutely is! There’s something about organising stuff that tickles my brain just right.
When I started university and had to scale back on my volunteering hours, I ended up giving up translation and sticking with tag wrangling, which has given me a lot of opportunities over the years to distract myself from course work, while still helping me feel productive.
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
There are honestly a lot of different things I could put down as an answer to this question.
As many people know, the last few years have been turbulent for the OTW as a whole, and the Tag Wrangling committee itself has also seen a lot of internal changes in the last year or so. While I’m happy to say that we’re now seeing a lot of progress in updating our policies and getting new projects off the ground, it definitely hasn’t been without growing pains.
While I haven’t been on the front lines spearheading any of these discussions or projects due to IRL commitments on my time and energy, I have been talking privately with some of the people who are pushing to make change within the committee. It has been incredibly disheartening to hear of some of the roadblocks that have to be overcome, whether it’s organisational inertia or simple lack of manpower, but I’m very hopeful that our current momentum will prevail so that we can make this committee (and this organisation as a whole) the best it can be. I’ll definitely continue to offer my support in the ways that I am able!
What fannish things do you like to do?
Mostly, I read a lot of fic! I rarely tend to stick to a single fandom for any length of time, but my bookmarks reveal that the fandoms I’ve read a lot in lately are Star Wars, Stranger Things, Hockey RPF, The Witcher, and The Pitt.
I’ve only written a handful of short fics myself, but I also beta fics for both friends and strangers! This is something I’ve done sporadically over many years, but I’ve been trying to offer my services more in the last year or so, as a way to give back more substantially to my fandom communities than just reading, kudosing, and commenting. Fic authors are so important to keep fandoms alive and thriving, and I’m happy to support them how I can! ♥️
Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/32276
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cimorene
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