Uber-geeking about tags with my "Giles the librarian" icon

[antennapedia]

So I have the AO3 freeform canonicals in a nice json file, and now I am looking at them. And I am boggling.

There are 14400 tags total in this category, but the tail of infrequently-used tags is very long indeed. Only 434 canonical freeform tags used more than 500 times each. Bring the cutoff down to 100 uses and you get 1589 tags, which is still

Comments

[beccaelizabeth]

Things like post-movie(s) on the other hand… this and post-series should not both exist, and the parens around the S feel wrong. There’s a pre-canon tag that’s closer to what I want. Pre-canon and post-canon cover it.

I am reading this to mean that you think post-movie is same as post-series is same as post-canon ?

post canon is not the same as post movie when the movies happen first (Stargate, Highlander, and actually Buffy come to think) or between series (Doctor Who)

if I read wrong, apologies for random comment.

[antennapedia]

Hmm, good point. With Buffy, the [expletive] comic books are allegedly canon & they're post-series. I still don't like the tags at the top level. They should be fandom-specific and named. E.g., btvs:post-movie, btvs:post-series, btvs:post-canon.

[beatrice_otter]

Heh. AO3 has canonical tags for "How do I tag" (130 works) and "I'm bad at tagging" (80 works).

Melannen, the tag wrangler for the Les Mis fandom, has some posts on How To Tag currently under lock at her DW journal, which she may be cleaning up and posting unlocked somewhere. If you're interested in the perspective of a wrangler.

[antennapedia]

Oh, man, I would be so frustrated if I were a wrangler unable to fix obvious typos that nobody-- not even the author-- wants.

[beatrice_otter]

My understanding is that they can fix obvious typos and connect tags to similar/identical tags so that they all get brought up by the same search, but they can't say "you really should tag this wing!fic with the wing!fic tag, if you want people looking for wing!fic to be able to find it ..."