Fannish history: Character and pairing meta-tags on AO3

I was going through old folders and found this file from 2010, when I was a tag wrangler. I'd almost forgotten this, but I was actually the one to suggest that we use meta-tags for characters and pairings (as opposed to just for freeform tags and (I think?) fandoms). The plan before that was to use some sort of disambiguation pages for ambiguous character and pairing tags, sort of like Wikipedia.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting snapshot of AO3 and tag wrangling, so I'm posting it. I'd forgotten that bit about how much work it used to be to re-name a canonical tag which had lots of other tags attached to it! You had to manually unhook all of them and then re-hook them afterward.

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