Quote:
Originally Posted by Montana Harper
Is it safe to assume that there's no way for FFF to tell whether or not AO3 tags are "canonical"? (That is, tags that are officially wrangled and set in a hierarchy on the site for others to use, versus random text that people type in and pretend is a tag when really it's commentary. *koff*)
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I've looked into that before. The only way I know to determine which tags are canonical (and get the canonical version) is to follow the link for each tag. Considering that would add dozens of extra site hits for many stories, I elected not to do it.
I did toy with the idea of caching tags after they've been looked up, but it's an awful lot of work just to work around AO3's design choices.
And wrangled tags aren't perfect, either. For example, the canonical tag for the character Miss Militia in Worm is
Hannah | Hana (Worm). The
canonical tag leaves out her 'cape' name that is used most of the time and can't decide which is the correct spelling of her secret identity name. That's not an improvement. I submit that
all of the 'Tags with the same meaning' (even
Miss Miliita) are better than the canonical one.