Archive Testing, 1... 2... 3...

[icarus]

An Archive Of Our Own is in testing. To help facilitate this, I am slowly uploading fics there and assiduously providing feedback on what works, what doesn't. Hopefully my suggestions are helpful and not too redundant.

Please let the archive know if you note any problems:

Tanlines & Dogtags

First Signs Of Magic: Hermione Granger

A Moment Of Sin

My question for you is on tagging in the An Archive Of Our Own. Yes, it sorts by tags like delicious.

What would you like to see in tags so you can find what you want to read? What makes a good tag? How general should I be? How specific? How much should I customize tags to the content of the story? Is there such thing as "over-tagging"?

For example, for Tanlines & Dogtags I have the tags:

* drama
* pre-slash
* ust
* mild angst
* photography
* art

While for A Moment Of Sin I only used the tag:

* prostitution

I realized, huh, I'm not sure how to do this.

This is in your interest. If I tag badly, it will make it difficult for you to find what you want. It also helps me, so thank you all very much in advance.


ETA: Based on your suggestions, here's what I have for tags: http://archiveofourown.org/en/users/Icarus/profile

Length: shortfic, medium length, longfic, novel length

Character: All prominent characters are listed, even if they're not the main pairing.

Time: season, pre-OotP, where relevant.

Genre: humor, angst, romance, darkfic, drama, crack!fic, au, bdsm, pwp

Pairing generalities: rairpair, crossgen, chan

Story themes to help people beeline their searches: prostitution, polyjuice, photography, gay bar, gun kink, wingfic, crossdressing, non-con, exhibitionism, skinny dipping, etc.

Series name: Primer to the Dark Arts, Beg Me For It, Skinny Dipping, and First Signs of Magic series names (and future series names).

It's clear to me that your ability to filter and find stories will depend upon successful tagging by the authors.

Comments

[ca-pierson.livejournal.com]

Pairing generalities: rairpair, crossgen, chan

I'm sorry, but I don't know what 'rairpair' means.

Otherwise I'm a firm believer that 'too many tags' is an urban legend. That is, as long as you can search them properly. I've been around the archive only twice and I like the way it's set up. The list of tags gets a tad long sometimes and at least in SGA I don't see why there should be a John Sheppard/Rodney McKay and a mcshep pairing. Unless it's standardized to some degree redundancies will occur and it'll render the archive pretty much useless in my eyes, because - tell me if I'm mistaken - if I click both mcshep and John Sheppard/Rodney McKay I'll only get the stories that have both tags? Not the stories that have either of the tags?

Another thing that I found rather stumping is, that when I like look for SGA, John Sheppard/Rodney McKay and then try to refine by tags I happen to sometimes get 0 returns even though it says there's 2 of these tags present. So I'm thinking these numbers are based on the whole fandom and will only come in handy once there's more archived there. When I have a fandom with 10.000 stories of which 5.000 are in my pairing chances are I'll at least get a few returns . . . I guess.

Hmm, sorry, babbling here :) I'll stop now.