Jon Phipps's Library tagged semantic →  View Popular

The wiki format provides a simple way to describe a tag – click and edit – as well as a discussion forum, since every page has both an [EDIT] as well as a [DISCUSS] button. All the changes to a page are recorded and can be tracked, updated, reverted in the case of vandalism. Wikipedia (and other Wiki communities) have various processes behind the scenes to maintain at least the community. This can be tricky and seem too bureaucratic to some since in Wikipedia’s case, it is driven by the goal of making encyclopediac-type documents with a Neutral Point of View (NPoV). This might not be what would work best as a forum for describing and discussing tags, so such a wikitag service would probably have a different policies since the aim is not to build a coherent aggregate from individual pages.

There are alternative ways to track the change of semantics over time of a community with records, such as using web forums or mailing lists with archives but these have different interaction styles and a slightly larger barrier to entry in terms of registering, which remains optional on wikis mostly. Forums and mailing lists also do not have the built-in focus on building and editing a shared single thing – a web page in this case – but they could be something also attached to a shared wiki consensus for a tag.

The centralising of a single site to perform the tag-to-person mapping is a significant downside, as it is arguable that some existing tag-using site could just become the definitive one. There are probably other more distributed approaches to this, but ultimately somebody has to provide the Wiki, and services such as Wikipedia have reached some middle ground in terms of a public service and functionality.

Semantics from Tagging

So imagine that a wikitag system exists and the socializing behind tags now exists, how do the meanings get recorded beyond just a wiki-page of words? There are methods for performing this from wiki-space righ tnow.