Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?
Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin, D-Lib Magazine (01)
A folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually
created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add
tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags
are then shared and sometimes refined. In this article the authors at what
makes folksonomies work. They agree with the premise that tags are no
replacement for formal systems, but see this as being the core quality that
makes folksonomy tagging so useful. (02)
They begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which
critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the
folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are
conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. They then go on to question
this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting
issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata,
and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very
openness that has made folksonomies so popular. (03)
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html (04)
Ed Dodds (05)
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