AO3's Tag Wrangling Chairs estimate that the group is on track to wrangle about 2.7 million never-before-used tags in 2019, up from 2.4 million in 2018. Instead, you pick whichever one you like, the tag wranglers do their work behind the scenes, and readers looking for any of these synonyms will still be able to find you.ĪO3's trick is that it involves humans by design-around 350 volunteer tag wranglers in 2019, up from 160 people in 2012-who each spend a few hours a week deciding whether new tags should be treated as synonyms or subsets of existing tags, or simply left alone. And you definitely don't need to tag your fic with all of them just in case. Wrangling means that you don't need to know whether the most popular tag for your new fanfic featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson is Johnlock or Sherwatson or John/Sherlock or Sherlock/John or Holmes/Watson or anything else. (Autocomplete is there to help, but they don't have to use it.) Then behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. On AO3, users can put in whatever tags they want.

I might look through a medical journal database for articles tagged 'cataracts,' search a stock photo site for pictures tagged 'businesspeople,' or click on a social media hashtag to see what people are saying about the latest episode of #GameOfThrones. Here's a problem that AO3 users, like the rest of the internet, encounter every day: How do you find a particular thing you're interested in, while filtering out all the other stuff you don't care about? Most websites end up with tags of some sort. It's also the architecture of the site itself.Īt a time when we're trying to figure out how to make the internet livable for humans, without exploiting other humans in the process, AO3 (AO3, to its friends) offers something the rest of tech could learn from. It's not just the fanfic, fanart, fanvids, and other fanworks, impressive as they are, that make Archive of Our Own worthy of one of the biggest honors in science fiction and fantasy. One of the nominees for the Hugo Awards this year is Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction archive containing nearly 5 million fanworks-about the size of the English Wikipedia, and several years younger.

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