Tag wrangling diaries: This fandom-dropping process
About a month ago, TW chairs announced a new limit: each wrangler should have a maximum of 450 assigned fandoms. Of the 400+ wranglers in the committee, only 3 actually had more than 450 fandoms, so for most people this was going to make no difference in their lives at all.
So, hey, I’m one of the 3! Figured I’d write about it.
To be clear, the limit is for admin reasons. There hasn’t been any allegation of “you’re falling behind in wrangling because you have too many fandoms to keep up with.” Not to me, and I have no reason to believe it’s happened to either of the others, either.
The thing is, my habit for a while now has been “check the Unassigned Fandoms list for webcomic fandoms with less than 5 works, pick them up, tidy up whatever tags they have, and then just…keep them.”
I’ll take tiny fandoms in other areas of personal interest, too. For instance. at some point I picked up a bunch of Dracula spinoffs/adaptations. Webcomics are just the category I was regularly sweeping for.
So I ended up as the wrangler for hundreds of fandoms where they got one (1) fic, the fandom got canonized, and then nobody ever wrote another fic for them ever. Hundreds more where they’d be lucky to get 3 new fics in a year, so there’s a tiny irregular trickle of new tags that I have no trouble staying on top of. In the rare case where a tiny fandom takes off, and I can’t keep up with the tags anymore, I set it free to be scooped up by a new wrangler! Most of the time, that does not happen.
And that’s how I was wrangling 1527 fandoms as of November 15.
Chairs made it clear they weren’t saying “you need to cut that to 450 fandoms overnight.” Which is good, because I don’t even want to think about the effects of bulk-dumping 1000+ fandoms into in the “newly available, seeking a good wrangler” chat channel.
So far I’ve had a 3-pronged strategy:
1) Offer fandoms to wranglers of related series. Example: I had a bunch of Oz spinoffs/adaptations, so I reached out to the wrangler who had the Wizard of Oz movie, and asked if they’d be willing to take some off my hands. They were kind enough to take a combination of “spinoffs they were personally familiar with” and “spinoffs that get 0-3 new fics a year anyway.”
I do plan on circling back and doing this with those Dracula spinoffs, too. And there are plenty where I know they have related fandoms…but I need to get around to checking whether the others have any wrangler at all.
2) Put more fandoms on the “I’m wrangling this, but just to babysit, anyone who wants it is welcome to take it” list. Never sure if I’m hitting the right balance with this one — if there’s a fandom another wrangler would want, and I leave it off the list, they’ll never see it. But if I make the list too long, their eyes might glaze over before they get to it, so they still won’t see it.
I’ve been focusing this strategy on “English-language webcomics that are popular-enough I think there’s a decent chance they’ve been read by other wranglers.” And I’ve managed to hand off a few so far.
3) Just punting fandoms off my list, advertising that they’re available now, and hoping for the best. I’m trying to punt them in batches of 5-10 at a time, and aiming for “fandoms that are big enough another wrangler might have heard of them, but small enough that fans probably won’t suffer if they go completely unwrangled for a while.”
I’m also focusing this approach on the Korean/Chinese webtoons that I don’t personally keep up with. I can get pretty far with fan wikis and googling, but these would really be better off in the hands of a wrangler who (a) actively keeps up with the canon, (b) can read it in the original language, or (c) both. A handful of themhave been scooped by now, and I really hope that keeps up.
So far, so good!
As of today, my fandom count is down to 1400. Still got a long way to go before 450, but the progress is steady.
(It would be awfully satisfying if I managed to make regular status-report posts about this on the 15th of every month, huh? But no promises.)
#ArchiveOfOurOwn #tagging #webcomics
