Question: Is putting in a tag to the effect of "Thank you tag wrangler!" appreciated or just more work for you?
Aw, what a sweet question!
That’s fine if you feel like doing it, though no one should feel obligated to do so. I doubt most wranglers would consider a single thank you tag “more work,” given that we don’t have to connect it to anything and can just move it over to the land where everything that doesn’t belong in a single fandom lives. It would honestly be a rather nice counter to the times people randomly curse at us in the tags. :’)
Without seeing the wrangling interface, I think it can be hard to know what’s really work and what takes a few seconds at most?
Unmarked OCs that might be minor characters from canon, especially a canon that doesn’t have a wiki. More info here.
Tags in a language that very few (or no) members of the Translation team speak. (Omg, if any of you speak Turkish as your first language, please apply the next time Translation recruitment is open. Please. I’m begging you. You would be a hero to wranglers.)
Confusing tags that stay in draft forever, or where the character or referenced thing doesn’t show up yet in the work, so we have no idea what the tagger really means.
You know those collections of tiny Tumblr ficlets that people put into a single work instead of a series? And then some of those people only tag with first names for characters and relationships? While tagging like a dozen fandoms, so we’re not sure which Jack and which Harry they meant? Yeah. Full names are a wrangler’s best friends.
Generic character or fandom names being used for different characters or fandoms, forcing us to do the disambig dance. It’s not the fun kind of dance. It’s more like the macarena out of tune with zombies kind of dance. Save us from the macarena zombies. More info here.
Works tagged with RPF fandoms but that have just fictional characters, and works tagged with a fictional fandom that have just real people characters. More info here. (This is one of those things people yell at us for in the tags, but we have no control over it.)
Single-use freeforms/additional tags that clearly either have a filterable meaning or not. Syn and done or move and done. Wranglers can handle hundreds in an hour if they’re all clear, regardless of length. To repeat: we don’t care about length! Chatty is fine. “Tumblr-style” is fine. It’s not more work for us.
Using a tag that already exists (canonical or not) for the same meaning that it was originally used for. We never even have to look at it.
Original characters that are marked with (OC) or something like that. So fast, much move.
Characters from canon with their full names used, or if they only have one name, the fandom name in parentheses after it.
Relationships using characters’ full names.
Fandom tags that use the full fandom name, and if that’s kind of generic, having the media or author or year in the tag as well (depending on which makes the most sense for the fandom). No longer the sad, plaintive wails of “which Empire? which Librarians? which Ghost?” No more zombie dance.
Basically, every time a tag is clear and unambiguous, a wrangler smiles.
