With the new fandom nominations system here, there's a small but nonzero chance that someone might accidentally nominate a multimedia fandom (e.g. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which exists as a book, a TV miniseries, and a feature film) in a medium other than the one they meant to nominate. Nothing in the tutorial specifically address how to avoid this, unfortunately. I'm a tag wrangler for the AO3, so I have some knowledge of how the tags work, and I thought some advice on this point might be helpful. Please note that I'm doing this entirely off my own bat, not as an official communication from the AO3 or Yuletide.
Tag Forms
In most cases, tags for a book fandom have an author's name at the end (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré).
Tags for a TV show are just the title, UNLESS there's a need to disambiguate from another fandom/medium with the same title. The TTSS miniseries would be Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (TV), although no such tag yet exists on the AO3. If there's more than one TV show with the same title, they're differentiated by dates.
Tags for films have the date at the end (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)).
Tags for comics are just the title in most cases. The tag for Tintin comics is "Tintin" (as opposed to the tag for the new film, which I believe would be Adventures of Tintin (2011)). Sometimes comics are disambiguated by media type or 'verse, though.
RPF fandoms other than music fandoms have "RPF" at the end. "Warehouse 13" would be the TV show, "Warehouse 13 RPF" would be RPF of the actors or others involved in the show.
Theater fandoms generally are tagged by title and author's last name (Coriolanus - Shakespeare).
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the rules for other fandoms types (e.g. anime and manga, video games, music fandoms). My recommendation is to go to the AO3's
media index page and have a poke around.
Nominating Advice
If you're unsure what the right form is, I recommend going to the AO3's
media index page and looking up your fandom under the medium you want to nominate (so, look under movies if you want to nominate the TTSS film, under books if you want to nominate the book). That should lead you to the canonical form, if there is one. Please note that you're not required to use the AO3's "canonical" fandom names when you nominate. But I do recommend it as a way of avoiding confusion if your fandom exists in several forms.
If you don't find a canonical name, you can either create one according to the guidelines above, or just create a name that's unambiguous (e.g. "2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie") and let the mods sort it out behind the scenes. What I don't recommend is just nominating, for instance, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," because it's unclear if you mean the book, the miniseries, or the film.
Any Questions?
I can try to answer here from my perspective as a tag wrangler, but for official answers about Yuletide-related things, please contact the Yuletide mods.
Crossposted at
Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.