People are not "nice" enough for social tagging...

A very comprehensive article on the pros and cons of folksonomies can be found on InfoTangle. Ellyssa Kroski concludes that resistance is futile to the wisdom of crowds, even though there are several issues with folksonomies, such as no synonym control, lack of precision and hierarchy as well as lack of recall. The one I consider the most serious issue is Ellyssa's final point on folksonomies being susceptible to “gaming”:

"Gaming is similar to spamming and involves an unethical user who propagates links, or in this case, tags in order to corrupt a system. The Blocklevel blog raises a valid point that “malicious users can purposely pollute the “Tag Sphere” by tagging every bit of content with every possible tag – effectively spamming the system. This is definitely a possibility with user-based tagging systems. Although popularized by invoking a spirit of cooperation among users, folksonomies are vulnerable as there are always those who don’t play nice with others."

Those who don't play nice with others are what I consider the biggest issue and Wikipedia is where I experienced this myself. The lesson I learned there is that users with plenty of time on hands eventually end up having most authority, no matter what the quality of their entries or deletions is. If you have the time and will to simply delete anything anyone else puts on a page you consider "yours", it is difficult to counter that. So, as bad as this sounds, I am very pleased to read that Wikipedia has finally had a high profile problem that might eventually lead to improved rules and regulations making destructive behaviour more difficult. Have a look at this article titled "There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility'" to find out more about how Wikipedia countered the danger of a potential libel suit.

Oversimplifying this I think it comes down to the same old story: People are just not nice enough to fulfill the promises of concepts based on the prerequisite of people being nice. Take Communism, the Christian Bible or any other concept that did a lot of harm even though it had the best of intentions. Why should people suddenly be nice online if they have never been nice enough offline in the first place?

Anyways, I hope that Wikipedia and other pioneers of social tagging will find ways to deal with these sorts of issues. I am always impressed how quickly things become controversial on social tagging based websites. As a picture says more than 1000 words, I think flickr.com still has the most elegant way of sorting out controversies - the "most interesting" function. Try most interesting George Bush pictures on flickr.com for starters to find out more about the political mood on flickr.com...