Somewhere in Gretchen McCulloch’s recent posts or newsletters was this Wired piece from last year I’d never seen about how at Archive of Our Own they’ve found a middle-ground between free-form and top-down tagging that’s actually much more functional and much more usable.
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 about 2.7 million never-before-used tags in 2019, up from 2.4 million in 2018.
Although this isn’t about content moderation as you’d think about it in the context, say, of social media, I do think there’s a lesson to be carried over and it’s the same damned lesson community managers teach over and over: programmatic rigidity from above doesn’t work, and free-for-all anarchy doesn’t work. You need actual people in the middle, wrangling.