memex

“the results of Penn Tags were uneven. Users fell into three different categories: i) Librarians, who were systematic and disciplined in their use of tags from the outset. ii) The opposite extreme – occasional and sporadic users, who maybe added one or two or no tags, and who never formed a pattern in the tags that they did create. This was the majority of users. iii) Students who tagged lots of content and did start to develop their own taxonomies. For example, a veterinary student had created the the tag ‘feline’ and another with a narrower definition ‘feline – neuter’. These were the exemplerary users .Often, these were students who were tagging because it was asked of them as part of an assignment. Unfortuately, there weren’t anywhere near enough of them. Less than 5% of the potential user community participated in the experiment, and the ‘wisdom of crowds’ never got a chance to coalesce.”