vanderwal.net

There are days I really wish there were a test for people to get the ability to have access to edit Wikipedia. In the past month I have been asked over and over about folksonomy being a collaborative tagging, which makes no sense to people. It is tough to makes sense of the relationship to folksonomy as there is no relationship, as folksonomy is a collective tagging practice not collaborative. People depend on Wikipedia, which is the case of folksonomy they should not.

Collaboration and collective efforts are often confused by those not familiar with both terms, but they are not similar and they are two distinctly different efforts. Collaboration is people working together (often with a common goal) to build one thing (think wiki page with one understanding). Collective efforts are the aggregation of people's individual efforts, sometimes in the same service, but do not have common goal or common effort (del.icio.us page for a URL is the collective understanding of individuals tagging of that page for their own use.

Call to Fix Wikipedia entry on Folksonomy, Again

Can we get the mis-understood "collaborative tagging" out of the folksonomy page, since the descriptions around collective tagging are clearly a mis-understanding of the term collaborative, when they meant collective. There are collaborative tagging efforts in content management tools, where they are working toward one single on a limited understanding of terms, but that is not what has been described.

You ask why I do not change the page Wikipedia Folksonomy page. I did it a long time ago to fix the understanding and a friend pointed out that the edit was mine and I got irate e-mail. A since that time Wikipedia has modified its policies to improve the virtrol in Wikipedia.