Right around the time the author was celebrating Tagsgiving, I was in Library School, and tagging was a hot topic around those parts. The consensus there was: "

Right around the time the author was celebrating Tagsgiving, I was in Library School, and tagging was a hot topic around those parts. The consensus there was: "this is great and all, but there's a reason we have controlled vocabularies and classification systems. We'll see, we'll see." I was all in on the possibilities for "folksonomies" and user tagging. However I have to admit that I have not seen many examples of where uncontrolled tagging was all that useful at scale. To organize information, you need experts, with training, time, and a reason to get it right. Or, you can do it with an arbitrarily sophisticated, mostly theoretical ML system. But neither of these solutions benefit from having user tags.