Hello everyone. i'm one of the ao3 tag wranglers for mdzs

Hello everyone. i'm one of the ao3 tag wranglers for mdzs is the first line of a Twitter thread by pumpkinpaix about Mo Dao Zu Shi fandom tag wranglers' use of tone marks in canonical tags on Archive of Our Own. The thread was retweeted 225 times, quote tweeted 44 times, and liked 596 times as of February 2021, as well as discussed in a 160 comment thread on the anon meme fail fandomanon. It is an example of AO3 Tagging Policy Debate.
==Background==
Tone marks are diacritics used in pinyin to guide pronunciation of romanized Mandarin; "tone" is used in the linguistic sense of the word. Character, relationship, and some freeform tags on Archive of Our Own used tone marks for Chinese-language fandoms since at least 2019. For example, instead of "Nie Huaisang" the canonical character tag was "Niè Huáisāng." In the case of Standard Madarin Chinese, tone marks are almost only used in educational settings (such as when learning how to pronounce things) and every-day use of pinyin usually leaves off the diacritics on both names and words. (See Wikipedia:Pinyin#Usage) 
Diacritics are hard for English-language keyboards to type, requiring either memorization of Unicode code points or a specialized keyboard layout. Many users expressed frustration with the tone marks because they made the AO3 search bar and tagging drop down basically useless for the majority of users, as neither would recognize that a user inputting "Nie Huaisang" really meant "Niè Huáisāng" — although frustratingly the tagset interface would automatically turn tags without the tone marks into the canonical tone marked version, dragging the tagging problems encountered when posting a fic into gift exchange sign ups.
A late 2019 discussion of the downsides and reasons for diacritics in AO3 tags can be found here.
==Excerpts==
==Responses==
The thread received a variety of responses, many of them supportive (especially on Twitter) with fans keen to point to the thread as evidence that issues are often more complex than they first appear; many others were critical, finding pumpkinpaix's motivations for something that was causing a lot of users frustration to be selfish and petty.
===Supportive===
===Critical===
==Eventual removal of tone marks==
In February 2021, tag wranglers began to switch canonical tags across several fandoms to versions without tone marks. One nonny on fail_fandomanon said that "Judging by internal chatter, MXTX wranglers took a vote. The majority was against diacritics, that wrangler was outvoted, and that was that."Nonny, comment on FFA post 1490, 2021-02-18. Other anonymous users in the thread expressed both joy, relief, and excitement; many said that searching for what they want on AO3 and tagging works would be easier. The change also seemed to affect other fandoms, such as Nirvana in Fire.
==Current state of tone marks?==
In September 2021, a new thread in fail_fandomanon reported that MDZS tone marks seemed to have returned., 2021-09-03. (Accessed 5 September 2021.)
In early November 2021 AO3 users noticed that AO3 tag autocompletes were now diacritic insensitive, which removes one of the objections to having tone marks in canonical tags.
==References==
Category: 2020 Meta
Category:Mo Dao Zu Shi
Category:Meta on Twitter
Category:Organization for Transformative Works Meta
Category:Social Media Feature-Meta Monday