It is well known that ‘CMS’ stands for Content Management System. But few people know that CMS aren’t actually enough to manage content. There litterally are hundreds of CMSs out there, each of them suitable for specific purposes. There are also in house built CMSs, developed to fit a particlular organisation needs. But none of them can magically make content management easier and more efficient.

A CMS is a system that helps to manage content by storing content in a database. Such tools have facilities to create, edit and publish content. They make website manager life easier thanks to template managed pages and quality control (eg links check). CMSs are also useful to content contributors, they can organise their work with workflows and amend content in WYSIWYG editor. These systems help to give consistency to a website content and layout, and allow to manage in one place content published to several websites.

From the previous list of features, it transpires that CMSs are not magic though. Here is a non extensive list of what they can’t do:

• define content categories and categorise it,
• decide who is liable for each part of content,
• know which are strategic pieces of content,
• find out when to review a particular sub section of the site…

Here is the bottom line: CMSs are tools, one kind of tool which is only part of the full tool kit of any accomplished Content Manager.

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?