Comparing revisions for WikkaFolksonomy

Deletions:
~& **One more vote for tags here**...
~& While I can agree with JavaWoman's opinion on the relative uselessness of widespread tags //in general//, given the service provided by search engines, I do not second this view in the context of wikis, personal and small group information systems. But it is the very principle on debating on the "usefulness / uselessness" for everyone that I find questionable: many people finds their own way to use tags, and trying to evaluate a-priori what can be done with them and whether this is useful or not is a restricting approach IMHO. Human creativity has always defeated predictions and real usages are often unanticipated usages. The short message service (SMS) is a nice example: the designers of the GSM standard have been debating on its value and usefulness, the service was even about to be dropped from integration in the standard but there were some few spare bytes available in some payload part of the protocol so it was finally adopted, with very few hopes in its value. In the end, it became one of the most popular application of the mobile phone, despite the horrible ergonomy! Coming back to tagging and wikis, why do I find them nice ?
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~& - they are a **very simple and flexible way of grouping, tracking and moving information fragments**, in this case wiki page.
~& - and grouping, tracking and moving are **user-defined**.
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~& Wikis are very dynamic for the content of pages, but the spatial structure is much more static: as the names of pages are used for references, changing page names is rarely done, so wikis structure essentially evolves as a "growing graph", with very few nodes mobility in the graph.
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~& Tags offers this opportunity by introducing an **overlaid namespace** which is **flexible**. Tags can be used for ontology building, but they are **not limited to categorization** (a rather static usage): they can be used to group pages for any aspects, static or dynamic: for example, I like to use wiki for managing tasks. In this usage, assigning and //updating// "status" information (like "todo", "completed", "urgent") is very useful, as well as supporting //quick access to pages matching a given status// (like "urgent"). This is just an example of using tags which is not classical categorization.
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~& One may objects that this is //bad// practice, hackish way or whatever; it works very well for me, and I don't see any objective reason not to use them the way it //helps// me, and certainly not to comply some dogmatic principles ;-). We should also remember how the hypertext experts community criticized the web model when it was introduced, how messy it was considered with only one link type to support all referencing needs. The freedom, simplicity and flexibility offered by its linking model is one of the reason that let the web emerge from other hypertext systems (like gopher, which had a semantically richer linking model).
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~& Many people like Wikis for the same reason: simplicity and flexibility, resulting in a powerful tool with many possible usages. I think that tags well fit in this principle. In Wikka, the category system seems oriented to support the traditional ontology usage more than "tagging" (Am I wrong ?)
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~& Regarding JW's comment on relying on search engine to support informal tagging, I have two objections:
~& - people like to use common words for tags, and as such, explicit tagging would requires the user to use non ambiguous tag name (I mean, names that would not collide with the text appearing in content of the page), such as prefixing with Tag (TagToDo, TagCompleted).
~& - As tags can be used for assigning status and tracking, the tagging system has to ensure that listing the pages belonging to a tag is correct (like in "list all pages with tag 'Urgent'"). While database search would returns correct results, an external search engine would not be able to track tags/pages associations in a coherent manner.
~& --HackArt
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