I don't understand this tag wrangling thing

[jmtorres]

So I was typing tags in on stuff I'm posting to AO3, and I typed "safe sex" in on a story in which Jack confirms Gwen and Owen have been using condoms and you know how AO3 suggests canonical tags? The only canonical tag it suggested for "safe sex" was "Unsafe Sex."

What.

Apparently the canonical tag that means something close is "Safer Sex," which I don't get? Is this a terminology change in sex education? Like how STDs have become STIs since I was in high school? Or... what?

I've been complaining to viridian5 about it and she mentioned that some of her tags have changed (like character name formats) or vanished from her stories. Is that a result of tag wrangling? If so, WTF? The way I understood tags and tag wrangling on AO3, the idea was you could tag however made sense to you, and tag wranglers would link tags that meant the same thing so a search for one would bring up linked others--but your tags would still be your tags.

So confused.

Comments

[torachan]

Yeah, since there's no such thing as 100% totally safe sex, the term has become safer sex to reflect that.

[jmtorres]

I am still unhappy that I typed in "safe sex" and was offered "Unsafe sex."

[briarwood]

I may be wrong, but I don't think the tag wrangling is the same thing as the suggestions that pop up when you type your tags. The suggestions seem to just pop up based on what you type, so it makes sense that typing 'safe' would get you 'unsafe' as a suggestion.

If you click on that tag for 'unsafe sex', do you get stories tagged with 'safe sex'? That's what the tag wrangling would do.

[jmtorres]

The relevance of tag wrangling to the suggestions is that only the wrangled canonical tags present as suggestions.

[briarwood]

Okay, that makes sense. Apologies.

[aris_tgd]

Yeah, the tag wrangling thing has confused me as well. I don't know entirely what's up. I want proper capitalization on my tags, dammit!

[franzeska]

Which capitalization in particular is the problem? Maybe it's something we can fix.

[aris_tgd]

Well, the only one that's actually ticking me off is that the official overarching tag for "Gregory House" is apparently "gregory house", but I'm mostly just waiting for the fix that lets you keep capitalization in personal tags for that.

[franzeska]

I don't think variant capitalization is going to be an option, unfortunately. It's going to stay as either the first thing someone enters or whatever tag wranglers change it to. In this case, since 'gregory house' isn't the current canonical, I guess the wrangler didn't see fit to correct the capitalization the original tag creator used. It should be fixed now.

[aris_tgd]

... Okay, wait, I though that variant tags under a canonical would display on your story the way you typed them in? So if you typed 'Huddy' on your story it would display that way and link to 'Gregory House/Lisa Cuddy' on the tag list and when you clicked it?

[franzeska]

Almost. However, there can only be one of each tag, and the system doesn't perceive upper- and lowercase as distinct. So if the first person who types in "Gregory House" types it in as "gregory house", lowercase it stays until a tag wrangler changes it. Even if you type it in properly, the system will just stick the already-created tag on your work.

[aris_tgd]

Oh, jeez, that does make tons of sense. Thanks.

[copracat]

Dude, no. viridian5 should log a support request because the tags that she puts on her works should not change. The tags in the filter box may change because they reflect the wrangling. So say you have "McShep" as your pairing tag. That is what you wrote on your work: that stays. The filter, on the right hand side, will say "Rodney McKay/John Sheppard" and it will say that for every story where the wrangler has linked a tag to "Rodney McKay/John Sheppard", for example: Rodney/John, Sheppard/McKay, John Sheppard/Rodney McKay.

[jmtorres]

I told her she should!

viridian5 brings out the worse in technology sometimes *G*

[viridian5]

It's my gift, it's my curse? *g*

[viridian5]

Thanks, but this was well over half a year ago and I can no longer be as certain of all the details if asked. *g* The names I changed back have so far remained. I figured it was early beta hiccups and moved on.

[zvi]

The suggestions, in addition to reflecting canonical tags, also reflect spelling. If you type "safe sex" really fast, it will suggest Unsafe Sex but not SafeR Sex for orthographic reasons. If you had just typed "safe" and waited for suggestions to pop up, you would have gotten both Safer Sex and Unsafe Sex suggested.

Irregardless, if you tag with the uncanonical "safe sex", your story will be sorted along with everything tagged the canonical Safer Sex.

[franzeska]

The autocomplete isn't very smart. It just pops up whatever contains the exact string you're typing in. 'Safe' should get you both 'unsafe' and 'safer', but 'safe sex' will never get you 'safer sex'.

The only part of people's tags tag wranglers can change is the capitalization. There have also been some changes like converting "SAMENAME - Character" and "SAMENAME" into "SAMENAME" and "SAMENAME - Freeform" (when people insist on repeating all of their tags in the freeform field in addition to the character/pairing/fandom ones), but that's not something wranglers can change. I'm pretty sure I know what caused viridian5's problem, but it wasn't tag wranglers.

[jmtorres]

I have a theory? That early on when the canonization of a tag changed, anyone who had the canon version 1 found themselves with canon version 2 instead. I don't know how plausible that is, but I know she had more than " - character" or capitalization stuff, she had like, middle names dropping out.

[franzeska]

Yeah, that's pretty weird. I know there was a bug involving people updating tags and accidentally deleting them entirely, but I have no idea about this. Hopefully, whatever it was won't be happening any more.