The Trouble With Folksonomy

Folksonomies are structured data, usually in the form of tags. These tags are set by the author of the content, and that author is usually an amateur who is just trying to get himself heard, and has a somewhat vague idea of the scope of the broader site. Flickr, Livejournal, Dailykos, and many other sites are currently using folksonomy-type tags. Some of these sites allow any user to register to add additional tags to an entry.

Folksonomies at their best solve one of the biggest problems with metadata: one person or team can't possibly know all the words that might be used to get at a particular piece or type of content. When you open up that pipeline and allow anyone who stops by or contributes to tack on the words he thinks are most relevant, you get so many more entry points to the data. The downside is that when people, particularly people who pride themselves at being outside of the mainstream, are faced with a field in which they are expected to submit something that is relatively standardized and guessable, will try to be unique. Today on Dailykos, kos complained to his users about editorializing in tags: "...the tags are meant to be used as a categorization tool. They're not supposed to be used as a place for editorial comments. ...If you are creating a new tag, make sure it's a legitimate tag ... The success of the tagging feature depends on proper categorization." To some degree, this is true. Deliberate misuse of tagging results in categorization noise that will never be used to return results. I have noticed that many people in online communities get satisfaction from trying new or unique ways to communicate. Livejournal users will put content in their "current music", "current mood", and tag fields that relate to the post but are not related to the way people are likely to browse for the content in the post. Deliberate misspellings, random phrases tangentically related to the topic, and editorial commentary abound.

Is this behavior a problem? It can be, but only if the content is intended to be found and consumed by "outsiders." Many online diarists will use non-standard tags that help them group together their own thoughts within their own journal. These non-standard tags are prevalent on flickr, too. The user striatic from Flickr has an excellent post about how and why to use personal tags, group tags, and public tags.

Impenetrable tagging is not the only issue with folksonomies. When a user uploads a photo, she may just tag it as she sees it: it's a photo of San Francisco, therefore it gets that tag. Many people will miss the obvious entry points and get too general. They will tag a photo with "San Francisco" when the photo is actually of a crowd at the Folsom Street Fair.

These notes on folksonomy are not intended as a condemnation of the idea. I think that a folksonomy that is gently guided by a manager who hooks together similar concepts with a controlled vocabulary (for instance, managing stemming in tags, so that "republican" and "republicans" access the same set of posts) could be a solution to many problems of organization within online communities and content repositories.