December 28, 2006: On Tags

I was glad to see Yahoo! 360° introduce a tagging feature for blog entries. Given that I cannot really count on the Search tool for anything useful, tagging is the next best thing. Readers may even recall that I started experimenting with using Flickr for the images I was incorporating in order to tag those images (many of which were not photographs). However, once I hit the maximum number of images I was able to store without charge, I decided that I was not getting enough benefit to justify paying for an upgrade. So over the last couple of days I have been adding tags to all of my blog entries, drawing upon the tags I had assigned to the images where appropriate; and, so far at least, I have been relatively satisfied with the results. (Among other things, they helped me to find the proper destination for the above hyperlink!)

Having said all that, however, I should make it clear that these are my own tags for my own use purposes. I do not expect them to be of much use to anyone else unless I tell someone to look at a collection of entries associated with a specific tag. In this respect I subscribe to one of Wittgenstein's fundamental precepts: Words only convey meaning in the context of how they are used. I know my own contexts of use well enough to use my own tags; but I doubt that any amount of my reading of anyone else's texts will provide me with a use-model that will allow me to negotiate that persons tags for my own use-purposes. To put this another way (and draw upon a past discussion), tags are a highly impoverished "solution" (which is why I am using scare quotes) to the problem of description. This is because, at the end of the day, description is most effective if it is recognized and rendered as a literary form, far more subtle than we tend to take it to be. We tend to associate description at its best with well-written fiction; but, to reflect on a recent discussion, the well-edited review is also, by its very nature, an excellent example of good descriptive writing. My great fear is that our increased immersion in the use of "rich media" may eventually erode the talent of skilled literary description, and we may be left with little more than increasingly sophisticated tagging systems. This will erode not only our literary capabilities but our very capacity to make ourselves understood.

August 05, 2006 (2): Further Reflections on Wikipedia

The Wikimania conference, at least as being reported by CNET News.com, seems to be providing me with an abundance of material for reflection. In this case I would like to pick out one paragraph from the report on Jimmy Wales' address to the conference that touches on "competition" with Britannica and the recent Colbert dig:

"The problem is that the technology barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are geeks but not computer geeks. And it doesn't keep out all the other idiots," he said.

This may be an indicator of why, at the end of the day, Wikipedia cannot seriously compete with an organization like Britannica. Both Britannica and its contributors recognize that "really smart people" are only part of the recipe for a successful reference resource. The other import part involves the "really smart editors." Having edited book reviews for Artificial Intelligence, I know that, even in the geekiest of settings, even the smartest of people need good editing. The Wikipedia philosophy seems to be that collaborative contribution can compensate for the lack of smart editing, and I just cannot buy into that philosophy.

My reason for this position is based on one of the simplest truths about any text: Any written text has two elements, the what-you-say part and the how-you-say-it part. (This is one of the things that makes the study of how narrative communicates so fascinating.) The best editors recognize these two elements and know enough to figure out which of the two (or both) need to be tuned before the contribution goes to press. I simply do not believe that the collaborative approach does a good job at keeping these two elements properly separated. Collaboration may remedy errors at the what-you-say level, because someone who knows more about the topic can use the mechanism to add his/her two cents worth. However, I suspect that content edited by the Britannica process will always trump Wikipedia content when it comes to how-you-say-it; and this is the element that is particularly important if a reader is trying to come up to speed on a new topic.

Perhaps (since he can probably afford to do so) Wales should volunteer some of his time as an intern among the editors working at Britannica to get a better feel for what makes an effective reference resource!