*nods* Gotcha. *wry* It's surely true that mysql is a very closed book to anyone who's never worked with it, and might not occur to a non-coder at all.

I'm working on a post in plain English, to say what I think should be done, right now! As I shake out the task-flow, I think a "request new canonical" form would have to be, like, the second step, right after publicly committing to the new course. Only logged in users can request. Such requests to be reviewed by the wranglers, and it should be a one-click approve if you can see that, yes, this character exists in that fandom, or yeah, actually, this term and synonyms of it seem to pop up a lot. A similar one-click reject option should pop up an email form to the requesting user, so the wrangler can say why, and a "blacklist?" option for use with malformed or malicious suggestions. Any already blacklisted suggestion does not go through but instead pops up a "this suggestion was previously blacklisted for X reason" message with a link to the Support page in case someone wants to argue about that.

If people want to get /fancy/ there could also be a threshhold function. So that, if an Additional tag has more than X many uses it's automatically shifted into the canonical pool. I'm not entirely sure that would be worth the trouble of coding it, but if someone likes the idea they could take a whack at it, and it might save some effort as the folksonomies of the Additionals develop.