Written by Franzeska Dickson
Tag wranglers are our biggest pool of volunteers, with over 100 wranglers around the world working to organise the Archive’s 100,000+ tags. The wranglers put in a varying amount of work, each wrangler deciding for themselves how much time they can dedicate to wrangling. We now profile a week in the life of one of our… more dedicated wranglers…
Monday: Look at all those fandoms without wranglers. How is InuYasha still missing a wrangler?! I’d better do some emergency wrangling before it gets any more out of control. That’s funny: these character names aren’t in Japanese order. Or are they? Maybe the original manga uses names in a weird order. I’d better go look at Wikipedia…
5 hours later:
Damnit.
Tuesday: 20 minutes spent making a google docs spreadsheet of all the Japanese names. 5 minutes spent wrangling all the pairing and character tags now that I’ve decided on a standard format. 5 hours spent catching up on all the Tuesday tv shows. (What’s up with that, US networks? Why is everything on Tuesday?!)
Wednesday: Hey, I know that obscure 19thC novel! I don’t remember this character though. Maybe there’s a copy on Project Gutenberg…
Thursday: Robin Hood doesn’t have a wrangler. That should be easy to wrangle… Huh. There’s a megafandom page on the internal wiki.
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Just how many Robin Hood adaptations are there anyway?! And they all spell the names differently! At least the megafandom team has a spreadsheet.
Friday: Characters and pairings seem pretty well under control, but my fandoms are full of freeform tags. Hey, ‘Bob’ isn’t a character in my fandom. Who’s Bob? I wonder if this is on Fanlore…
Saturday: Dreamwidth’s content search is awesome! I can search for my name, and my new fandom, and that weird word from word a day that I’m pretty sure no one has actually used in any posts. Look, someone posted about tag wrangling. And they have a question. That I know the answer to!
Sunday: This series isn’t even on Wikipedia. Maybe if I google it, I can find something. Hey, a bunch of the characters are listed on the TV Tropes page…
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What do you mean it’s Monday already?!