Are folksonomies any good?

A folksonomy is the result of collaborative tagging of pieces of content (websites, photos, etc.), made by users using only their perception of the content and their immediate need of it. As folksonomies don’t rely on any established list of tags (or keywords), they are opposed to traditional classifications named ‘taxonomies’ or ‘ontologies’. The visual representation of folksonomies are tag clouds, that flourished on blogs and websites these last years. Most famous examples of folksonomy rich websites are del.icio.us, flickr or digg.

The term itself has been made up by Thomas Vander Wal in 2004, after ‘folks’ and ‘taxonomy’. Since then there has been a lot of talks about merits of folksonomies compared to taxonomies, to figure out which path was the future of information classification. Ones would advocate folksonomies are not reliable because they result in classifications subject to typographical variations or errors, lacks consistency, may contain inaccurate tags and are a confusion of “cataloging structure with personal opinions and subsequent social bookmarking.” All may be true, but is not a problem as folksonomies are just not taxonomies.

The great thing about folksonomies is that they work. People use them to describe and organise content they use daily. When tagging a website, one can get inspired by keywords used by previous users. Information retrieval is easier because tags have been made up by user himself. To quote Thomas Vander Wal:

“taxonomies are always less than perfect and most often far less than perfect for helping people find and refind information they need. But, we do need taxonomies to provide that foundation structure. We need solutions that can help the many people whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy.”

It seems to me that folksonomies are the user side of classification: intuitive and immediately efficient. Let’s leave consistency and total accuracy to taxonomies managed by professionals for whom information classification has to be that formal and logical. And it may also be possible to have both working together to optimise information description and retrieval.

Any more questions?

• What is Wikipedia definition?
• Are all librarians against folksonomies?
• Is there a useless website about folksonomies?