Thread:Discussing ontology and the internet (4)

After reading Shirky's article and also a few critiques written around the same time, Clay Shirky's viewpoints are overrated and Ontology is overrated followup, my take is that Shirky has created a dichotomy between user-created tagging and the kind of categorisation that he thinks is a problem (and I'm not exactly sure I understand what that is). Shirky doesn't talk about wiki categories. Seems like wiki categories is an option that has some of the advantages of tags. Interestingly, WikiMedia calls wiki categories "category tags", see Putting an item in a category.

Shirky states that his concern is with "that strategy of designing categories to cover possible cases in advance...." Wiki categories are not set up ahead of time, but rather are ever responding to author and user needs.

Later on Shirky says: If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.

This idea of sense-making rolled up into something which is more valuable, without a predetermined goal, seems to me what wiki categorisation is all about.

As for whether tags or categories are a better approach, I'm not sure. I can see some benefits and downsides of each.