*Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online*
Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction database recently nominated for a Hugo, has perfected a system of tagging that the rest of the web could emulate.
Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction database recently nominated for a Hugo, has perfected a system of tagging that the rest of the web could emulate.
Kudos to the fans. One of the nominees for the Hugo Awards this year is Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction archive containing nearly 5 million fanworks—about the size of the English Wikipedia, and several years younger. It’s not just the fanfic, fanart, fanvids, and other fanworks, impressive as they are, that make Archive of Our Own worthy of one of the biggest honors in science fiction and fantasy. It’s also the architecture of the site itself.
At a time when we’re trying to figure out how to make the internet livable for humans, without exploiting other humans in the process, AO3 (AO3, to its friends) offers something the rest of tech could learn from.
Here’s a problem that AO3 users, like the rest of the internet, encounter every day: How do you find a particular thing you’re interested in, while filtering out all the other stuff you don’t care about? Most websites end up with tags of some sort. I might look through a medical journal database for articles tagged “cataracts,” search a stock photo site for pictures tagged “businesspeople,” or click on a social media hashtag to see what people are saying about the latest episode of “GameOfThrones”.
Gretchen McCulloch is WIRED’s resident linguist. She’s the cocreator of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, and her book {Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language} comes out in July from Riverhead (Penguin).
Tags are useful but they also have problems. Although “cataracts,” "businesspeople," and “GameOfThrones” might seem like the most obvious tags to me, someone else might have tagged these same topics “cataract surgery,” "businessperson," and “GoT”. Another person might have gone with “nuclear sclerosis” (a specific type of cataract), “office life,” and “Daenerys”. And so on.
There are two main ways of dealing with the problem of tagging proliferation. One is to be completely laissez-faire—let posters tag whatever they want and hope searchers can figure out what words they need to look for. It’s easy to set up, but it tends to lead to an explosion of tags, as posters stack on more tags just in case and searchers don’t know which one is best. Laissez-faire tags are common on social media; if I post an aesthetic photo of a book I’m reading on Instagram, I have over 20 relevant tags to choose from, such as book books readers reader reading reads goodreads read booksofig readersofig booksofinstagram readersofinstagram readstagram bookstagram bookshelf bookshelves bookshelfie booknerd bookworm bookish bookphotography bookcommunity booklover booksbooksbooks bookstagrammer booktography readers readabook readmorebooks readingtime alwaysreading igreads instareads amreading. “Am reading” indeed—reading full paragraphs of tags.
The other solution to the proliferation of competing tags is to implement a controlled, top-down, rigid tagging system. Just as the Dewey Decimal System has a single subcategory for Shakespeare so library browsers can be sure to find Hamlet near Romeo and Juliet, rigid tagging systems define a single list of non-overlapping tags and require that everyone use them. They’re more popular in professional and technical databases than in public-facing social media, but they’re a nice idea in theory—if you only allow the tag “cataract” then no one will have to duplicate effort by also searching under “cataracts” and “cataract surgery.”
The problem is rigid tags take effort to learn; it’s hard to convince the general public to memorize a gigantic taxonomy. Also, they become outdated. Tagging systems are a way of imposing order on the real world, and the world doesn’t just stop moving and changing once you’ve got your nice categories set up. Take words related to gender and sexuality: The way we talk about these topics has evolved a lot in recent decades, but library and medical databases have been slower to keep up.
The Archive of Our Own has none of these problems. It uses a third tagging system, one that blends the best elements of both styles.
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.
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.
Users appreciate this help. According to Tag Wrangling Chair briar_pipe, “We sometimes get users who come from Instagram or Tumblr or another unmoderated site. We can tell that they’re new to AO3 because they tag with every variation of a concept—abbreviations, different word order, all of it. I love how excited people get when they realize they don’t have to do that here.”
Ça continue ici : ▻https://www.wired.com/story/archive-of-our-own-fans-better-than-tech-organizing-information
#Tags #tagging #nuage #themes #thématisation #nuage_de_tag j’ai du convertir en simple texte les tags cités en exemples dans l’article !
