This is the new stuff

Thomas criticises Wikipedia's entry on folksonomy - a term which was coined just over a year ago by, er, Thomas. As of today's date, the many hands of Wikipedia say:

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, typically using categories or tags on pages, or semantic links with types that evolve without much central control. ... In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams and hierarchical organization. An example is the way in which wikis organize information into lists, which tend to evolve in their inclusion and exclusion criteria informally over time.

Thomas:

Today, having seen an new academic endeavor related to folksonomy quoting the Wikipedia entry on folksonomy, I realize the definition of Folksonomy has become completely unglued from anything I recognize (yes, I did create the word to define something that was undefined prior). It is not collaborative, it is not putting things into categories, it is not related to taxonomy (more like the antithesis of a taxonomy), etc. The Wikipedia definition seems to have morphed into something that the people with Web 2.0 tagging tools can claim as something that can describe their tool

I'm resisting the temptation to send Thomas the All-Purpose Wikipedia Snark Letter ("Yeah? Well, if you don't like the wisdom of the crowds, Mr So-Called Authority..."). In fact, I'm resisting the temptation to say anything about Wikipedia; that's another discussion. But I do want to say something about the original conception of 'folksonomy', and about how it's drifted.

Firstly, another quote from Thomas's post from today:

Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrival. The tagging is done in a social environment (shared and open to others). The act of tagging is done by the person consuming the information.
...
There is tremendous value that can be derived from this personal tagging when viewing it as a collective, when you have the three needed data points in a folksonomy tool: 1) the person tagging; 2) the object being tagged as its own entity; and 3) the tag being used on that object. ... [by] keeping the three data elements you can use two of the elements to find a third element, which has value. If you know the object (in del.icio.us it is the web page being tagged) and the tag you can find other individuals who use the same tag on that object, which may lead (if a little more investigation) to somebody who has the same interest and vocabulary as you do. That person can become a filter for items on which they use that tag. You then know an individual and a tag combination to follow.

This is admirably clear and specific; it also fits rather well with the arguments I was making in two posts earlier this year:

[perhaps] the natural state of knowledge is to be 'cloudy', because it's produced within continuing interactions within groups: knowledge is an emergent property of conversation, you could say ... [This suggests that] every community has its own knowledge-cloud - that the production and maintenance of a knowledge-cloud is one way that a community defines itself.

If 'cloudiness' is a universal condition, del.icio.us and flickr and tag clouds and so forth don't enable us to do anything new; what they are giving us is a live demonstration of how the social mind works. Which could be interesting, to put it mildly.

Thomas's original conception of 'folksonomy' is quite close to my conception of a 'knowledge cloud': they're both about the emergence of knowledge within a social interaction (a conversation).

The current Wikipedia version of 'folksonomy' is both fuzzier and more closely tied to existing technology. What's happened seems to be a kind of vicious circle of hype and expectations management. It's not a new phenomenon - anyone who's been watching IT for any length of time has seen it happen at least once. (Not to worry anyone, but it happened quite a lot around 1999, as I remember...)

1. There's Vision: someone sees genuinely exciting new possibilities in some new technology and writes a paper on - oh, I don't know, noetic telepresence or virtual speleology or network prosody...
2. Then there's Development: someone builds something that does, well, a bit of it. Quite significant steps towards supporting network prosody. More coming in the next release.
3. Phase three is Hype. Hype, hype, hype. Mm-hmm. I just can't get enough hype, can you?
4. The penultimate phase is Dissemination: in which everyone's trying to support network prosody. Or, at least, some of it. That stuff that those other people did with their tool. There we go, fully network prosody enabled - must get someone to do a writeup.
5. Finally we're into Hype II, also known as Marketing: 'network prosody' is defined less by the original vision than by the tools which have been built to support it. The twist is that it's still being hyped in exactly the same way - tools which don't actually do that much are being marketed as if they realised the original Vision. It's a bit of a pain, this stage. Fortunately it doesn't last forever. (Stage 6 is the Hangover.)

What's to be done? As I said back here, personally I don't use the term 'folksonomy'; I prefer Peter Merholz's term 'ethnoclassification'. Two of my objections to 'folksonomy' were that it appears to denote an end result as well as a process, and that it's become a term of (anti-librarian) advocacy as well as description; Thomas's criticisms of Wikipedia seem to point in a similar direction. Where I do differ from Thomas is in the emphasis to be placed on online technologies. Ethnoclassification is - at least, as I see it - something that happens everywhere all the time: it's an aspect of living in a human community, not an aspect of using the Web. If I'm right about where we are in the Great Cycle of Hype, this may soon be another point in its favour.