Olson: The Power to Name

It was eye-opening to think of information classification as an activity that risks not just inconveniencing people, but also marginalizing them. Groups at the top of the hierarchy get first priority, and the classifier decides which groups are dominant.

Recently I’ve seen some discussion of folksonomies (folk taxonomies) which are at the opposite extreme: they provide a total lack of structure and let classification grow organically through users' choices. I wondered whether Olson was referring to that approach when she wrote, “…users could be encouraged to create their own links between documents… and leave a trail for future users.” Maybe the real solution lies somewhere between the extremes: classifiers providing a loose framework and “real people” working out the details organically.