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>users can put in whatever tags they want. (Autocomplete is there to help, but they don't have to use it.) Then behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any
by ziddoap 2y ago
>users can put in whatever tags they want. (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.
This is what booru sites have done for ages. Danbooru is the only booru mentioned in the article (and just as a passing mention despite being a few years older than Archive of our Own). I can only guess that AO3 is a bit more palatable than boorus for a general audience.
But this style of tagging really is the best of both worlds. The only downside is, as mentioned, the requirement for manual labor. I implement a similar system myself, obviously at a way smaller scale, for my own pictures. Basically I tag things as I feel like it at the time, and then every few months I "wrangle" the tags, as they do here.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoExactly that, it's labor intensive, while tech tries to reduce labor intensivity by using magic or rules or whatnot. Related and larger scale projects are sites like Wikipedia or TVTropes, although Wikipedia makes use of a lot of automation as well.
- jchw 2y agoIt's mildly amusing that AO3 is considered more palatable than booru websites. Both AO3 and many of the boorus have content that would be hard for most folks to stomach. I guess AO3 has the advantage of being mostly text, (which seems to be generally less visceral to people,) but it is also nearly completely uncensored, since that's kind of the point of it.
- ziddoap 2y agoYes, overall I wouldn't describe either of them as particularly palatable to a general audience, haha. Your hunch is the same as mine -- text has much less potential for instant shock. On AO3 you have to, sort of, go out of your way (by reading, or searching for specific tags, etc.) to hit the unsavory stuff.
- yapyap 2y agoEven if you did find the unsavoury stuff on Ao3 it might take a while to get to it in the story whereas in an image you could be blasted with the sin of more than a thousand words all at once
- canadiantim 2y agoCan't you just use AI to wrangle now instead?
- McGlockenshire 2y agoYou can totally use machine learning to classify stuff, that's one of the main things we've been trying to do with it, after all! But that automatic stuff often is entirely without soul and without contextual understanding. Useful as a starting point, perhaps, but the human touch is still needed to organize information like a human wants.
- McGlockenshire 2y agoA lifetime ago, on Stack Overflow, I was one of those people that monitored tags. I nuked needless new tags as often as I could, replacing them on each post with more correct existing tags. I ended up with a set of huge search bookmarks with regularly recurring bad tags to help keep things under control. Burninating bad tags became a delightful passtime. But eventually I burnt out on SO as a whole and dropped out. That was a decade ago now. I recently rediscovered one of the search bookmarks and lemme tell you things got really bad in my absence. The New Tag Deletionist Cabal is no more. Every volunteer counts.
- grotorea 2y ago> 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. "Featuring". Yes Wired that is a technically accurate description. They could have tried Steam, but I don't think it works as well. Although they did start with the pure freeform one and switched to a managed one the next day.