#folksonomy

the secret brilliance of the fanfiction tag system

Made a bunch of Toontown cog ocs because boy I'm in deep! Made for a toontown fan region concept named Classique Cul-de-sac that's run by freaks who need therapy.

Except Frankie the Flunky she's doing fine and everyone likes her because I said so

Sketches dumps below!

"Tumblr is one of the most popular content sharing websites, where the use of keyword tags that enhance the searchability and visibility of posts is prominent. However, this resource has been creatively exploited by some users beyond its folksonomic use: Since Tumblr does not have a separate comment section for posts, the tag section may also be used for tags with discourse functions such as expressing an opinion, a reaction, or including asides. [...] The results suggest that social tagging practices on Tumblr are influenced both by the technological specifications of the platform and the social structursociabilitye of the website."

On AO3, 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. 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. And you definitely don't need to tag your fic with all of them just in case. 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.

AO3'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. AO3's Tag Wrangling Chairs estimate that the group is on track to wrangle over 2 million never-before-used tags in 2019, up from around 1.5 million in 2018.

Laissez-faire and rigid tagging systems both fail because they assume too much—that users can create order from a completely open system, or that a predefined taxonomy can encompass every kind of tag a person might ever want. When these assumptions don't pan out, it always seems to be the user's fault. AO3's beliefs about human nature are more pragmatic, like an architect designing pathways where pedestrians have begun wearing down the grass, recognizing how variation and standardization can fit together. The wrangler system is one where ordinary user behavior can be successful, a system which accepts that users periodically need help from someone with a bird's-eye view of the larger picture.

These are co-occurrence graphs for the tag ‘Romy’ on Tumblr, AO3 and Etsy respectively. Data was collected on all available instances of the ‘Romy’ tag in 2016. Graphics are taken from my PhD thesis, Serious Leisure in the digital world: exploring the information behaviour of fan communities. Thanks to @destinationtoast for the awesome Python code that actually made this possible. <3

You can view larger versions of the graphs on this post.

TUMBLR

Entire dataset (ZOOM IN):

The most interconnected tags (betweeness centrality +1):

ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN

Entire dataset (it was huge - tagging on AO3 is so complex and granular in general) (ZOOM IN):

The most interconnected tags (betweeness centrality +1) (ZOOM IN):

ETSY

Entire dataset (Etsy was the least complex) (ZOOM IN):

The most interconnected tags (betweeness centrality +1) (ZOOM IN):

"Amazon decided to let anyone tag any product with anything, they thought they were getting people to add value for nothing. It was an early hint about where the eventual “creator economy” would go: people doing free work for a multi-billion dollar company for the sense of community and for the satisfaction in seeing their work on the big famous platform, but certainly not for any worthwhile amount of money." "What could go wrong?"