Creator reveals/feedback post

[worldbuildingmod]

The collection is no longer anonymous, and is also closed for posting of new works.

Huge thanks to everyone who has helped make this round such a success; I am absolutely thrilled by the fact that (with the addition of a few late treats) we have hit the 100 works mark.

As in previous years, do feel free to leave any and all feedback you may have about the exchange here. This round I do have a few specific areas, mostly related to the tag set, that I'd be particularly keen to hear participants' thoughts on:

Splitting up Original Works

In Round 3, "Original Work" was (as it had been in previous years) one fandom in the tag set, but I split it on the spreadsheet version for readability reasons, guided by the disambiguations nominators had provided. This year, some nominators ran with that general idea and nominated subfandom tags to the tag set itself; after further discussion revealed that this was a popular idea, this was implemented across the board. How successful (or not) do people feel this was? Is it something that you would want to see repeated? Is there a way to avoid getting bogged down in genre definition debates? (I genuinely loathe genre definition debates. Also, please note that "Well, if everyone just agreed that my definitions are the right ones it would all be fine" isn't a solution that appeals to me, at all.)

Allowing Group/Any nominations

The general rule to date has been that, beyond "Any or No Characters" and "Original Character(s)" (including "Original [Specific Type of] Character(s)", the character tag slots are for characters rather than groups. My main reason for this has been that the tag set is complex enough already without asking people to deal with using things like "group: A/B" in the character slot, but this year in particular there seemed to be quite some demand for this, and (related at least in my mind) "Any [Type of Character]" tags, which to me are "your choice from group: A & B & C & D & ...". I can definitely see an argument in favour of this related to improving the quality of matching, which has always been the driving force behind the way the tag set is structured. I also have a lingering feeling in the back of my mind that I've been nowhere near as consistent about this, both within and between rounds, as I would like to pretend to myself, so it might be better to embrace it fully rather than let it continue to be a grey area. (On which point, whatever decision I end up making, I will definitely make the guidelines post clearer on all this in future.)

If you have strong feelings either for or against such nominations being allowed, please let me know. (Follow up question: if you're in favour, do you think you would want more slots?)

Tag set efficiency

For a number of reasons, some within my control and others very much not, I found the tag set process (which has, in all honesty, always been my least favourite part) particularly frustrating this year. I think I can make a lot of difference to this by adjusting the scheduling so that I don't put too much pressure on myself - expect to see a significantly longer gap between the close of nominations and the opening of sign ups next round, possibly even a Yuletide-style no-approvals-until-noms-are-closed approach - and I'm also optimistic that AO3's Elastisearch upgrade will mean that overall server load has decreased so that the tag set script will cope better. However, I'm also actively considering ways to reduce the workload associated with it. The simplest of these would be stop making the spreadsheet - while I tend to think it's useful, it's clearly not essential, since nearly half of this round's participants signed up before I had managed to make it live. On the other hand, making it does help me catch tag set errors better than any other method.

Another idea I've been toying with is adapting Trick or Treat's "Eternal Tagset" concept and creating a new tag set that's a superset of all tags used in WBEx to date, to which new nominations could be added each year, but with no need to renominate things that have already been through the process. Creating this in the first place would be quite a lot of work, and there'd probably be some decisions to make along the way about how to combine (or not) similar-but-not-identical tags, but, at least theoretically, I could tinker with it slowly over the next nine months.

However, the biggest drain on my time during nominations is definitely dealing with tags that have not been nominated correctly. Many of you bend over backwards to accommodate my finicky desires for "Any or No Characters" without parentheses but "Original Character(s)" with, and so on, and I'm hugely grateful, but there are always a number of nominators who I'm uncertain have even glanced momentarily at the guidelines. One idea I've had is that it might be worth writing a much more step-by-step "how to nominate for worldbuildingex" post to go alongside the main opening-of-nominations one, with screenshots of how to format tags so that they will be approved easily, and also of some of the other types of nominations that I see most often that will never be approved, or require me to do significant adjustments on the back end. (Another thought I've had on at least some occasions is that I should be much less patient with nominations that linger without being fixed by the nominator after they've being raised in a queries post, and reject them once 48 hrs has passed.)

Any thoughts on the above, or suggestions for other ways to reduce the tag set workload, very welcome in the comments.

Comments

[seal_nonnie]

Thank you so much for modding this exchange! It's my favorite of the year. I think splitting up original works worked really well this exchange, and an eternal tagset would be very useful. I'm pretty ambivalent on groups in the tagset; & groupings feel more in the spirit of the exchange than / pairings.