Hi, Whatsit, and thanks for sharing your experience; it's always fascinating to hear from you guys.
My question: what's been the most difficult, most challenging wrangling job you've had? What kinds of tags and tag branches are the most challenging to sort out, and necessitate the most work and decision-making? I'm thinking especially of the kinds of decisions where you've had to compromise and go with some solution that isn't ideal, but which you still needed to make to keep the tags functional. Like when you know that a number of people won't like having their tag subsumed under a certain bigger tag, but you still have to arrange them like that that to keep things in order. What's the decision-making process like with those trickier kinds of tags; do you vote on those kinds of things?
Ok, that was probably more than one question, but I'm curious!
Most of the really difficult and challenging tag wrangling work is done at the committee level, and does involve a lot of discussion and voting. On a personal level, I don't know if this is going to be the most satisfying answer for you, but one of the more challenging wrangling jobs I ever had was when I was wrangling one of the Fallout fandoms for a while and there were a large number of characters that were all named "James" without a last name. So we had to come up with character tags that were like "James | Vault 75 Scientist" to distinguish them.
I also wrangle the original Twilight Zone series, and while it doesn't get a huge number of tags, the tags it does get tend to be for single-named characters that appeared in a single episode, so it involves a lot of research to try to determine what the character's actual name was in the show and how to canonize it appropriately.
Gary? Gary Gary gary gary gary gary gary, gary gary gary gary Gary!
(Translation: James? The Gary vault must have caused trouble, what with all the Garys!)
Cheers! And yeah, the character tags are a pain with those types of characters. In my current fandom, I have fleshed out over a dozen characters based on canon characters who never had a name in the show, most of whom were just extras, so it's a real PITA to try and single them out (especially if the credits only had "maid" or "soldier"). So it's like "Second Chancellery Maid Escorting Tan Qi In Episode 33" even at its shortest, and I wish I were joking...
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