I just applied when when I noticed that the OTW was recruiting new tag wranglers! Even though I was already volunteering with the organisation as a translator, I didn't get any preferential treatment or anything, I just applied alongside everyone else in the public recruitment round. The Tag Wrangling committee typically recruits new volunteers about three times a year, so if you'd like to apply, keep an eye on AO3's front page, OTW's social media accounts, or the official recruitment page!
As for your second question, each tag wrangler assigns themself to at least one fandom tag on the Archive (although most are assigned to quite a few), and it's then their job to wrangle the tags that show up in that fandom's "wrangling bins", as we call them. No one is forced to wrangle any fandom they don't want to, and a wrangler can always drop a fandom if it no longer sparks joy. I hope that answered your question, but let me know if I misunderstood or if there's anything you'd like me to elaborate on!
awesome! i've just thought of one more thing (sorry): how do tags that aren't under any specific fandom or work get sorted? like is there someone assigned to no fandom works or do people make a note of a tag that's recurring but not its own thing yet? thank you for the information :))
There are no wranglers assigned to wrangle No Fandom tags. If we get a tag in one of our fandom's bins that can get synned to an existing No Fandom canonical, we are free to do so, but canonising new No Fandom canonicals are done by consensus nowadays!
It used to be that any wrangler could wrangle anything in No Fandom, but this led to a lot of confusion in the form of multiple canonicals for one concept, non-standard formats, even wrangling wars between wranglers who disagreed how a certain tag should be wrangled, so No Fandom wrangling was practically closed for a very long time. In those years, we established a list as a way of keeping track of which concepts we'd like to canonise (for example due to high tagging numbers or Support requests), and that list has since been moved to a cool spreadsheet, so that we're better able to organise all the entries. In the last year, we've gotten some really great projects off the ground to help finally tackle the gigantic backlog, and you can check out some of the newly-canonised tags from those processes in the Updates to "No Fandom" Additional Tags news posts!
If there are any No Fandom tags that you'd like to see canonised or rewrangled, you can send a ticket to Support, who will then pass on the request to the Tag Wrangling committee.
Comment on Five Things calamario Said
AO3_Tag_Wranglers (Official) Thu 07 Aug 2025 01:20AM UTC
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