An Examination of Authority in Social Classification Systems

Champions of social classification praise its flexible and collaborative nature, in contrast to the rigidity and authoritarianism that they see in traditional classificative structures (such as Kroski, 2005; Shirky, 2005c; Merholz, 2004). In the view of these writers, social classification applications such as the photo storage Web site Flickr and the Web bookmarks manager del.icio.us are both democratic, incorporating the participation of all Web users, and emergent, changing rapidly in response to new content. On the other hand, traditional methods for organizing information, particularly those that involve hierarchy, are seen as exclusive, because they may not represent all usersâ viewpoints, and imprecise, because they cannot be easily adapted for the rapid pace of content development engendered by Web publishing. Two claims appear to underlie these descriptions of social classification. One, that the goal of classification is to identify and locate items based on a personal sense of appropriate categorization, and two, that, if enough other users index (or tag) items according to their own personal ideas of appropriate categorization, then all possibilities will be represented, and both searching and browsing will be facilitated. This paper will evaluate these claims, particularly in regards to the role and nature of authority in organizational schemes, and the intersection of authority with an organizational schemeâ s purpose. I consider these issues for three services often associated with social classification systems: * Indexing of personal collections. * Sharing of indexed personal collections. * Merging of personal collections into a group-indexed aggregate collection. The bookmarks manager del.icio.us is the primary example of a social classification system used throughout this paper