Some thoughts about tagging on AO3
There are a lot of people confused about what to tag their stuff on AO3. I mean, like, people who use AO3 regularly sometimes talk about not knowing how to tag their fic. And this is Yuletide; there are people who only post to AO3 for ficathons such as Yuletide, and they probably are even less sure what to do. There aren't many rules, and even the guidelines are kind of fuzzy. But yet there are many dedicated volunteers who spend many hours trying to make some sense out of the mess! It's chaotic and organized at the same time.
Fear not. I'm not a tag mod or anybody from AO3, but I am a power user of the site, and have been since it started, so I have a pretty good feel for the different ways people use the site and how people tag. So here are some suggestions, if you feel you need them. ETA: Thanks to some wonderful feedback in the comments, I'm adding some other perspectives.
First, remember that the primary purpose of tags is to help people find stuff they'd like to read. No matter what your philosophy of tagging is, your goal should be to make it easy for people to find your fic and decide if they want to read it.
There are two basic ways people use tags when they're looking for fic.
1. Clicking on tags they want to read. Do you want to look for a particular fandom, character, or pairing? You can click on a tag and get all of them to come up. But you can use tags to find so much more than just the basics! Do you want to read wing!fic? Search for it on the archive and click the wingfic tag and you'll get a list of all fics tagged with "wings" or "wingfic" or something similar. The tag mods have done a lot of background work to make sure that similar tags (i.e. every permutation of wingfic ever used) are put together so when you're looking for wingfic you don't have to think of every possible permutation of what someone might have tagged it. They'll all come up. Now, if you click on the "wingfic" tag, it will bring up every wingfic in every fandom. Which is great if you're polyfannish like I am and don't necessarily care what fandom something is if it hits whatever kink you have right then. If you are more monofannish, then the sort and filter bar on the left side of the "Works" list is your friend, but either way, the tag is the first place to start. People look for a lot of things. Here are some categories that people may search tags for, either within a particular fandom or across the archive:
3. Looking for things to avoid. If a trope squicks someone, they want to know before they click on the story. If someone hates a character or relationship, they want to know if it's in a story. Even if it's only in a minor/background way. Protip from tag wrangler liviapenn:
"if you are posting a story and you want to indicate that the character or ship appears in the story -- but only in a minor/background role -- you can tag for them in the "Additional Tags" field, with a modifier. For instance, "Minor appearance by Sam Wilson". Or, a tag like "Very minor background Tony Stark/Pepper Potts" or "Past Tony Stark/Pepper Potts" for a story where Tony and Pepper's relationship is only mentioned but not really important in the story. Then those stories won't come up when people are searching for Tony/Pepper in the Relationships field. You can also make 'warning' type Additional Tags more specific or accurate, with modifiers like "implied," "referenced," "minor," "mentioned", "non-graphic" or "past", if the story doesn't seriously focus on those topics, but you still want to indicate that they appear in the work, even in a minor or slight way."
(ALSO, if you are one of these people, the "Sort and filter" bar on the right side of the page is your friend. I hate, loathe, and despise Killian Jones on Once Upon a Time, and so whenever I'm searching for OUaT fic on the archive I go to the "Sort and Filter" bar, go down to the Exclude section, and I check his name and any pairings he appears in. Then I hit the "sort and filter" button at the bottom of that bar, and poof! It's like he never existed! It's wonderful.)
So how does this affect how you tag your fic? I'm so glad you asked. It means you need to take both uses of tags--finding fic, and deciding if you want to read a fic you've found--into account. As you tag, ask yourself: what in my fic might people want to read? What kind of craving would my fic satisfy? Tag for those things (fandoms, characters, relationships, tropes, kinks, whatever). Then ask yourself: once people have found my fic, what might help them decide they want to read my fic? Then tag for that. Then ask yourself: is there anything in my fic that might squick people or that they might want to avoid? Then tag for that, too. Autocomplete is your friend. As you start typing in the tag field, it will bring up tags people have already used, which are searchable, and which may therefore help people find your fic.
ETA: section edited because of youraugustine's feedback.
But beware! Before you hit "post," look at your tags and ask yourself: is there any deceptive advertising here? By which I mean, if someone is looking specifically for a fic with something you tagged for, are they going to be disappointed in your fic? Different people use tags differently, so you can't please everybody. But sometimes a selective approach can be better than a "kitchen sink" approach where you select every tag that might be half-way applicable.
As an example, take Sam Wilson. He is tagged in over 2800 stories on AO3 ... but in the vast majority of them, he's a sidekick, if that. Yes, he appears in each of these fics, but he's a very small part of the story in most of them. When I go looking for Sam Wilson fic, I sigh, because I may get three pages in to the list of works tagged "Sam Wilson" before I find one where he's important enough in the story to get mentioned in the summary. Having to slog through all those fics about other Avengers to get to the fics about the character I want to read about does not make me likely to read those stories. It makes me annoyed, because they're taking up my time and preventing me from finding the stories I actually want to read right now! I love reading about Steve's angst over Bucky, and Bucky's recovery, but if what I'm craving at the moment is Sam Wilson pwning everything, 50k words of Buck-and-Steve angst in which Sam appears in three scenes is just not going to scratch my itch. On the other hand, some people may find a mention that Sam plays a role in the story to be the difference that makes them read this Steve/Bucky fic over some other one. Even so, if he appears briefly but isn't significant to the plot, even they may be annoyed.
Now, as sandrine points out, some people have aversions to particular characters, pairings, and tropes, such that including them in your fic will completely ruin the fic for them even if all that happens is a one sentence mention buried in 100k of fic. For example, some Science Bros and Steve/Tony fans prefer not to read about Tony/Pepper. (I get it, because I loathe Killian Jones with the passion of a thousand burning suns.) liviapenn points out that (instead of using a regular character tag), if you put a tag with a modifier in the "Additional Tags" category (for example, "background Tony/Pepper"), it will be there for people who want to avoid it but won't pop up for people searching it out with the main character or relationship tags.
Just use some common sense, folks. Tag for everything important, and don't bother with the minor stuff. And you're the one who knows your story best; you know what's important in your story.
On creating new tags:This is particularly important for Yuletiders to know, since so many of us will be creating tags for characters and fandoms that did not exist on the archive before this Yuletide.
From tag wrangler liviapenn:
The only other advice I would give is for people posting stories in superhero comics fandoms. So many superhero names are very generic, or shared by multiple people within one canon (like the 3 or 4 different versions of "Robin", "The Flash" or "Supergirl" in DC fandom.) If there's a possibility that your character's cape name might have been used for another character (in your fandom or another fandom) maybe consider tagging with their "real" name instead of (or in addition to) their "cape" name. So for instance, "Tim Drake" or "Robin - Tim Drake" "Tim Drake aka Robin" -- any of those would be better than just "Robin".
Finally, if you want to find out whether a tag already exists in some format you can use the Tag Search page:
http://archiveofourown.org/tags/search
So let's say I wanted to find out if there's a canonical tag for food carts or food trucks. I would go to the tag search page and type in "cart* " (which brings up any word that starts with "cart") and click the Canonical ticky box. This just brings up a lot of tags about Sam Carter and Peggy Carter though. So I hit backspace and type in "truck* " and click the Canonical ticky box, and this will bring up all canonical tags that have a word that starts with truck in it, and hey, one of them is Food Trucks.
Freeform: Alternate Universe - Truckers (10)
Freeform: Truckers (8)
Freeform: Food Trucks (7)
Freeform: Episode: s08e07 Shawn and Gus Truck Things Up (1)
Freeform: Trucks (11)
If anyone has any other questions about tagging I'd be glad to answer them!
From tag wrangler lost_spook:
As another tag wrangler, I'd just add that the thing about cape names applies generally really - if you want to make a freeform (or any tag) involving your characters, remember the archive is a big place and expanding all the time with fandoms in multiple media, so the more you use full names etc., the more likely it is the tag can stay in your fandom or eventually become canonical.
one of the joys of Yuletide is that it's about fic in rare fandoms or non-existent-till-now fandoms, but that does mean you might well find yourself posting the first fic in a fandom or for that pairing or character - and that means you have to create that tag yourself. So I just wanted to add - don't be nervous of doing that! You don't have to read through archive tagging guidelines and get it perfect; just be as clear and specific as you can, especially with fandom tags, where the wranglers dealing with those might never have heard of it. The same with new character and relationship tags - do add them! Just be sure to use full names in both categories, and if the names are very common or likely to cause confusion, add something like the fandom name in brackets to make doubly sure. Wranglers can link up any tags like these no problem - it's only when things aren't clear (ambiguous), that it gets tricky.
(Wranglers in tiny fandoms love it when they suddenly have actual tags to wrangle! ♥)
From an anonymous tag wrangler:
One other thing I'd like to suggest is keeping each freeform/additional tag to one discrete concept! For example, "Tony Stark Has Daddy Issues" is a single concept; "Tony Stark has daddy issues and mommy issues and luckily lots of money too" includes several, and is unlikely to ever become filterable in any way. Also, if a single concept is split across multiple tags, a wrangler often can't do anything with the individual tags-- for example, the two tags "his heart", "it is so broken" is likely going to end up with both tags unfilterable instead of being linked to a canonical tag like Heartbreak.
When a new tag is created (i.e. when someone tags their fic with something that has never before been tagged) it is not yet canonical--that is, when you click on it, you won't bring up any other fic tagged with it, and even if someone else uses that tag, at this point it won't come up when you click on the tag. That only changes when a tag wrangler--a volunteer with AO3, in charge of wrangling tags for that particular fandom--looks at it and decides what to do with it. Most chatty tags get ignored (unless the wrangler has seen others very similar). New fandom tags and character tags get made 'canonical' and attached to particular fandoms, so that a) they will now be clickable so you can find other fic tagged with that tag once other people use it and b) it will come up in the autocomplete. Other tags that the wrangler thinks will be generally useful (i.e. anything that other writers might use) get made canonical as well, either attached to the fandom (Tony Stark's Daddy Issues) or not attached to the fandom (mpreg, wingfic, etc). Tags that are close to/mean the same thing as other tags already in use get 'synned' to those tags, so "Bechdel Pass" and "Bechdel Test Pass" become functionally the same tag--you click on one, you get all the fics tagged with one or the other, so you don't need to know the exact tag you're looking for if you can get close.
A note: the tag wranglers are awesome, and do a lot of work behind the scenes to make the Archive work right. To learn more, check out this post on AO3. And if you want to make life easier on the tag wranglers, here's something one of them posted on tumblr:
What actually makes life harder for tag wranglers? People tagging obscure characters or OCs who are not in the work. Private bookmark tags that use terms we’ve never seen before. Smushnames. Comma fail. Drafts that stay for months because people keep editing them. All of those are allowed, and hardly anyone ever says anything about them outside of wrangler spaces.
If you spot a tag that you think is wrong (wrong spelling of a name, for example, which I've come across a couple of times--for some reason Vulcan women often get their names improperly capitalized, T'lar instead of T'Lar, that sort of thing) you can report it! At the bottom of every AO3 page is a link to "Technical Support and Feedback." Your comment will be sent to the tag wrangler for that fandom, and they can then either fix or explain the issue. (Thanks for pointing this out, liviapenn)
If you're really interested in How It All Works, you can check out the Sekrit Decoder Ring of tagging, aka the Tag Wrangling Guidelines. It's designed for the Tag Wranglers, so you don't need to know it--they'll handle any fixes that need fixing--but it's there if you want it.
If you want a different step-by-step explanation of how to tag on AO3, here's a post by superhappygenki, an AO3 tag wrangler.
Hope this all helps!
Fear not. I'm not a tag mod or anybody from AO3, but I am a power user of the site, and have been since it started, so I have a pretty good feel for the different ways people use the site and how people tag. So here are some suggestions, if you feel you need them. ETA: Thanks to some wonderful feedback in the comments, I'm adding some other perspectives.
First, remember that the primary purpose of tags is to help people find stuff they'd like to read. No matter what your philosophy of tagging is, your goal should be to make it easy for people to find your fic and decide if they want to read it.
There are two basic ways people use tags when they're looking for fic.
1. Clicking on tags they want to read. Do you want to look for a particular fandom, character, or pairing? You can click on a tag and get all of them to come up. But you can use tags to find so much more than just the basics! Do you want to read wing!fic? Search for it on the archive and click the wingfic tag and you'll get a list of all fics tagged with "wings" or "wingfic" or something similar. The tag mods have done a lot of background work to make sure that similar tags (i.e. every permutation of wingfic ever used) are put together so when you're looking for wingfic you don't have to think of every possible permutation of what someone might have tagged it. They'll all come up. Now, if you click on the "wingfic" tag, it will bring up every wingfic in every fandom. Which is great if you're polyfannish like I am and don't necessarily care what fandom something is if it hits whatever kink you have right then. If you are more monofannish, then the sort and filter bar on the left side of the "Works" list is your friend, but either way, the tag is the first place to start. People look for a lot of things. Here are some categories that people may search tags for, either within a particular fandom or across the archive:
- fandoms, characters, relationships, obviously.
- AU types: is it a canon divergence, is it a highschool au, or a coffee shop, or whatever?
- SFnal or fantasy elements: time travel, wings, magic, werewolves, telepethy, etc
- Genres: angst, fluff, mystery, comedy.
- Trigger warnings to avoid: mentions of rape or abuse (things not warned for in the warning tags).
- Tropes: Aliens made them do it, kidfic, etc.
- Sex stuff: kinks, positions, sex toys, polyamory, etc.
- Social justice stuff: bechdel pass, character of color POV, etc.
- Fandom specific stuff: is it related to a particular episode, or season, is it about a particular theme or backstory or trope or characterization that your fandom likes, is there any other fandom-specific thing that people might look for?
3. Looking for things to avoid. If a trope squicks someone, they want to know before they click on the story. If someone hates a character or relationship, they want to know if it's in a story. Even if it's only in a minor/background way. Protip from tag wrangler liviapenn:
"if you are posting a story and you want to indicate that the character or ship appears in the story -- but only in a minor/background role -- you can tag for them in the "Additional Tags" field, with a modifier. For instance, "Minor appearance by Sam Wilson". Or, a tag like "Very minor background Tony Stark/Pepper Potts" or "Past Tony Stark/Pepper Potts" for a story where Tony and Pepper's relationship is only mentioned but not really important in the story. Then those stories won't come up when people are searching for Tony/Pepper in the Relationships field. You can also make 'warning' type Additional Tags more specific or accurate, with modifiers like "implied," "referenced," "minor," "mentioned", "non-graphic" or "past", if the story doesn't seriously focus on those topics, but you still want to indicate that they appear in the work, even in a minor or slight way."
(ALSO, if you are one of these people, the "Sort and filter" bar on the right side of the page is your friend. I hate, loathe, and despise Killian Jones on Once Upon a Time, and so whenever I'm searching for OUaT fic on the archive I go to the "Sort and Filter" bar, go down to the Exclude section, and I check his name and any pairings he appears in. Then I hit the "sort and filter" button at the bottom of that bar, and poof! It's like he never existed! It's wonderful.)
So how does this affect how you tag your fic? I'm so glad you asked. It means you need to take both uses of tags--finding fic, and deciding if you want to read a fic you've found--into account. As you tag, ask yourself: what in my fic might people want to read? What kind of craving would my fic satisfy? Tag for those things (fandoms, characters, relationships, tropes, kinks, whatever). Then ask yourself: once people have found my fic, what might help them decide they want to read my fic? Then tag for that. Then ask yourself: is there anything in my fic that might squick people or that they might want to avoid? Then tag for that, too. Autocomplete is your friend. As you start typing in the tag field, it will bring up tags people have already used, which are searchable, and which may therefore help people find your fic.
ETA: section edited because of youraugustine's feedback.
But beware! Before you hit "post," look at your tags and ask yourself: is there any deceptive advertising here? By which I mean, if someone is looking specifically for a fic with something you tagged for, are they going to be disappointed in your fic? Different people use tags differently, so you can't please everybody. But sometimes a selective approach can be better than a "kitchen sink" approach where you select every tag that might be half-way applicable.
As an example, take Sam Wilson. He is tagged in over 2800 stories on AO3 ... but in the vast majority of them, he's a sidekick, if that. Yes, he appears in each of these fics, but he's a very small part of the story in most of them. When I go looking for Sam Wilson fic, I sigh, because I may get three pages in to the list of works tagged "Sam Wilson" before I find one where he's important enough in the story to get mentioned in the summary. Having to slog through all those fics about other Avengers to get to the fics about the character I want to read about does not make me likely to read those stories. It makes me annoyed, because they're taking up my time and preventing me from finding the stories I actually want to read right now! I love reading about Steve's angst over Bucky, and Bucky's recovery, but if what I'm craving at the moment is Sam Wilson pwning everything, 50k words of Buck-and-Steve angst in which Sam appears in three scenes is just not going to scratch my itch. On the other hand, some people may find a mention that Sam plays a role in the story to be the difference that makes them read this Steve/Bucky fic over some other one. Even so, if he appears briefly but isn't significant to the plot, even they may be annoyed.
Now, as sandrine points out, some people have aversions to particular characters, pairings, and tropes, such that including them in your fic will completely ruin the fic for them even if all that happens is a one sentence mention buried in 100k of fic. For example, some Science Bros and Steve/Tony fans prefer not to read about Tony/Pepper. (I get it, because I loathe Killian Jones with the passion of a thousand burning suns.) liviapenn points out that (instead of using a regular character tag), if you put a tag with a modifier in the "Additional Tags" category (for example, "background Tony/Pepper"), it will be there for people who want to avoid it but won't pop up for people searching it out with the main character or relationship tags.
Just use some common sense, folks. Tag for everything important, and don't bother with the minor stuff. And you're the one who knows your story best; you know what's important in your story.
On creating new tags:This is particularly important for Yuletiders to know, since so many of us will be creating tags for characters and fandoms that did not exist on the archive before this Yuletide.
From tag wrangler liviapenn:
The only other advice I would give is for people posting stories in superhero comics fandoms. So many superhero names are very generic, or shared by multiple people within one canon (like the 3 or 4 different versions of "Robin", "The Flash" or "Supergirl" in DC fandom.) If there's a possibility that your character's cape name might have been used for another character (in your fandom or another fandom) maybe consider tagging with their "real" name instead of (or in addition to) their "cape" name. So for instance, "Tim Drake" or "Robin - Tim Drake" "Tim Drake aka Robin" -- any of those would be better than just "Robin".
Finally, if you want to find out whether a tag already exists in some format you can use the Tag Search page:
http://archiveofourown.org/tags/search
So let's say I wanted to find out if there's a canonical tag for food carts or food trucks. I would go to the tag search page and type in "cart* " (which brings up any word that starts with "cart") and click the Canonical ticky box. This just brings up a lot of tags about Sam Carter and Peggy Carter though. So I hit backspace and type in "truck* " and click the Canonical ticky box, and this will bring up all canonical tags that have a word that starts with truck in it, and hey, one of them is Food Trucks.
Freeform: Alternate Universe - Truckers (10)
Freeform: Truckers (8)
Freeform: Food Trucks (7)
Freeform: Episode: s08e07 Shawn and Gus Truck Things Up (1)
Freeform: Trucks (11)
If anyone has any other questions about tagging I'd be glad to answer them!
From tag wrangler lost_spook:
As another tag wrangler, I'd just add that the thing about cape names applies generally really - if you want to make a freeform (or any tag) involving your characters, remember the archive is a big place and expanding all the time with fandoms in multiple media, so the more you use full names etc., the more likely it is the tag can stay in your fandom or eventually become canonical.
one of the joys of Yuletide is that it's about fic in rare fandoms or non-existent-till-now fandoms, but that does mean you might well find yourself posting the first fic in a fandom or for that pairing or character - and that means you have to create that tag yourself. So I just wanted to add - don't be nervous of doing that! You don't have to read through archive tagging guidelines and get it perfect; just be as clear and specific as you can, especially with fandom tags, where the wranglers dealing with those might never have heard of it. The same with new character and relationship tags - do add them! Just be sure to use full names in both categories, and if the names are very common or likely to cause confusion, add something like the fandom name in brackets to make doubly sure. Wranglers can link up any tags like these no problem - it's only when things aren't clear (ambiguous), that it gets tricky.
(Wranglers in tiny fandoms love it when they suddenly have actual tags to wrangle! ♥)
From an anonymous tag wrangler:
One other thing I'd like to suggest is keeping each freeform/additional tag to one discrete concept! For example, "Tony Stark Has Daddy Issues" is a single concept; "Tony Stark has daddy issues and mommy issues and luckily lots of money too" includes several, and is unlikely to ever become filterable in any way. Also, if a single concept is split across multiple tags, a wrangler often can't do anything with the individual tags-- for example, the two tags "his heart", "it is so broken" is likely going to end up with both tags unfilterable instead of being linked to a canonical tag like Heartbreak.
When a new tag is created (i.e. when someone tags their fic with something that has never before been tagged) it is not yet canonical--that is, when you click on it, you won't bring up any other fic tagged with it, and even if someone else uses that tag, at this point it won't come up when you click on the tag. That only changes when a tag wrangler--a volunteer with AO3, in charge of wrangling tags for that particular fandom--looks at it and decides what to do with it. Most chatty tags get ignored (unless the wrangler has seen others very similar). New fandom tags and character tags get made 'canonical' and attached to particular fandoms, so that a) they will now be clickable so you can find other fic tagged with that tag once other people use it and b) it will come up in the autocomplete. Other tags that the wrangler thinks will be generally useful (i.e. anything that other writers might use) get made canonical as well, either attached to the fandom (Tony Stark's Daddy Issues) or not attached to the fandom (mpreg, wingfic, etc). Tags that are close to/mean the same thing as other tags already in use get 'synned' to those tags, so "Bechdel Pass" and "Bechdel Test Pass" become functionally the same tag--you click on one, you get all the fics tagged with one or the other, so you don't need to know the exact tag you're looking for if you can get close.
A note: the tag wranglers are awesome, and do a lot of work behind the scenes to make the Archive work right. To learn more, check out this post on AO3. And if you want to make life easier on the tag wranglers, here's something one of them posted on tumblr:
What actually makes life harder for tag wranglers? People tagging obscure characters or OCs who are not in the work. Private bookmark tags that use terms we’ve never seen before. Smushnames. Comma fail. Drafts that stay for months because people keep editing them. All of those are allowed, and hardly anyone ever says anything about them outside of wrangler spaces.
If you spot a tag that you think is wrong (wrong spelling of a name, for example, which I've come across a couple of times--for some reason Vulcan women often get their names improperly capitalized, T'lar instead of T'Lar, that sort of thing) you can report it! At the bottom of every AO3 page is a link to "Technical Support and Feedback." Your comment will be sent to the tag wrangler for that fandom, and they can then either fix or explain the issue. (Thanks for pointing this out, liviapenn)
If you're really interested in How It All Works, you can check out the Sekrit Decoder Ring of tagging, aka the Tag Wrangling Guidelines. It's designed for the Tag Wranglers, so you don't need to know it--they'll handle any fixes that need fixing--but it's there if you want it.
If you want a different step-by-step explanation of how to tag on AO3, here's a post by superhappygenki, an AO3 tag wrangler.
Hope this all helps!