I’m trying to understand AO3’s tag synning, but I’m honestly lost. Bratting is a canonical tag. Brat Taming isn’t marked as common and can’t be filtered on, and it’s linked to nothing else. But (slight) Brat Taming is not only marked as common, but it’s also synned with Bratting? I don’t think I’ll ever understand.
Tag wrangling is done by specific humans on specific dates. So is the tagging of works.
No doubt, someone used the synned tag a long time ago when wranglers were allowed to go mess with those tags. Later, there was a freeze on wrangling the pan-fandom trope stuff because 1. it was slowing down the archive for technical reasons and 2. there were a bajillion internal wanks about trying to standardize rules and make actual guidelines. Some of this was dumb fandom drama. Some of it was trying to get clueless but well-meaning people to stop repeatedly synning shit like ‘asexuality’ to shit like ‘sexless’.
The other tag must have come in later when nobody was allowed to touch it.
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That said, nothing can be both marked as common and a syn. It’s one or the other.
This is very interesting to hear (not so much about tag wrangling, more about the human component that agrees on how to wrangle) because tag wrangling is literally one of the first elements of AO3 that I’d consider a good candidate for automation. Imagine wrangling hundreds of tags per second, even thousands per second.
Yet when you provide examples like this I’m like NOPE BAD IDEA LETS JUST NOT.
(Not that I would like an automated wrangler anyway, I give into the thought experiment because it tingles my engineering brain)
I could see an automatic wrangler being useful as a first step for the human wranglers. A robot could make educated guesses and put things into potentially relevant boxes, and make the people’s job faster and easier (like how OCR can produce some pretty decent digitized texts, which still need to be carefully proofread by a human with real eyeballs before they can be trusted to make sense). But yeah, no way could we trust a robot to know that “languishing parrot” should probably synned to “dead dove”.
Pining for the fjords!
(TBH, I think the main reason nobody’s tried this approach is that it would be extra work to make without providing enough benefit to justify the coding time.)
Why you cannot use automation for AO3 tags:
Knife Play is a syn of Knifeplay, a subtag of Knives. People who look for fics tagged “Knives” will see “Knife Play” fics in the results, unless they have gone through weird measures to remove them.
Gun Play is a syn of Gunplay, a subtag of Guns.
Pony Play, you will be happy to hear, is NOT a subtag of Ponies. People searching for Ponies will not be seeing “Pony Play” fics.
The tag “Fruit” has subtags Apples, Oranges, Bananas, Pineapples, and a few others.
It does NOT have “Lemons.” Because people searching for “Fruit” in fics are not looking for the fics tagged “Lemon.” (Well. This is true for some kinds of fruit.)
And of course, there is the glorious and monstrous Sans/Sans tag:
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