Beneath the Metadata
Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy — Associate Professor / Information Resources Specialist — Montana State University <elainep@montana.edu> — Background — People have been trying to classify and organize information for thousands of years.
Context & Ripple Effects
This essay drops into a tagging fight that has been running through the blogosphere all year: Burningbird's Meta Wars in December 2005 and Smalltalk Tidbits' blunter contribution the previous September had already framed metadata as contested territory between professional cataloging and amateur enthusiasm. A Montana State University information resources specialist now supplies the library-science side with its most explicit philosophical statement — that folksonomy inherits classification problems people have wrestled with for thousands of years.
The pickup pattern matters as much as the argument: within days of publication, Personal InfoCloud and Joho the Blog both posted point-by-point replies, meaning the piece traveled through the exact community whose practice it critiques rather than staying inside library literature. That makes it a live intervention in the 2006 tagging debate, not a retrospective one.
First-order effects
- Montana State University's information resources specialist hands tag skeptics a formal argument — classification is hard, and user-assigned tags inherit every old problem — giving the anti-folksonomy camp a citable text instead of ad-hoc gripes.
- Personal InfoCloud and Joho the Blog publish replies almost immediately, so the essay's claims get contested in public within the same news cycle they appear.
Second-order effects
- The exchange forces tagging's defenders to argue philosophy rather than momentum: replies like Joho the Blog's have to engage the objection that informal classification fails, not just point to adoption.
- For practitioners choosing between tags and taxonomies, the debate clarifies stakes that were previously aesthetic — whether discovery systems need editorial control or scale substitutes for it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, classification authority splits by domain: professionally maintained vocabularies survive where precision matters, while user tagging governs discovery elsewhere — and essays like this one define where that line gets drawn.
The trend: Metadata practice is drifting from professionally curated taxonomies toward user-assigned tags, and each philosophical critique of folksonomy tests how much structure discovery actually requires.