#folksonomy

For Terminology Thursday, we're covering Folksonomies, a term for classification systems created not by site owners, but by the users themselves. Instead of a formal, top-down taxonomy, folksonomies grow from people tagging content in ways that make sense to them, making it easier for themselves and others to find things later.

The portmanteau was coined in 2004 by Thomas Vander Wal as a blend of folk and taxonomy. You may also see it referred to as social tagging, social indexing, or collaborative tagging.

As online communities grew, it evolved into a shared system shaped by many users adding, reusing, and remixing tags, appearing across various platforms, from social bookmarking sites to image-sharing communities like Flickr. In fandom spaces, user-driven tagging plays a significant role on platforms such as AO3, Tumblr, and FanFiction.net, where collective tagging helps fans organise, discover, and navigate content.

Discussions around Folksonomy often focus on its strengths and limitations, including its flexibility and community-driven nuances, as well as the potential for inconsistency or overwhelming tag variation. Still, for many fans, this organic, communal system is part of what makes online fandom so vibrant and searchable.

What are your experiences with user-created tagging systems? Join the discussion on Fanlore!

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the secret brilliance of the fanfiction tag system

Made a bunch of Toontown cog ocs because boy I'm in deep! Made for a toontown fan region concept named Classique Cul-de-sac that's run by freaks who need therapy.

Except Frankie the Flunky she's doing fine and everyone likes her because I said so

Sketches dumps below!

"Tumblr is one of the most popular content sharing websites, where the use of keyword tags that enhance the searchability and visibility of posts is prominent. However, this resource has been creatively exploited by some users beyond its folksonomic use: Since Tumblr does not have a separate comment section for posts, the tag section may also be used for tags with discourse functions such as expressing an opinion, a reaction, or including asides. [...] The results suggest that social tagging practices on Tumblr are influenced both by the technological specifications of the platform and the social structursociabilitye of the website."

On AO3, users can put in whatever tags they want (autocomplete is there to help, but they don't have to use it). Then, behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. Wrangling means that you don't need to know whether the most popular tag for your new fanfic featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson is Johnlock or Sherwatson or John/Sherlock or Sherlock/John or Holmes/Watson or anything else. And you definitely don't need to tag your fic with all of them just in case. Instead, you pick whichever one you like, the tag wranglers do their work behind the scenes, and readers looking for any of these synonyms will still be able to find you.

AO3's trick is that it involves humans by design—around 350 volunteer tag wranglers in 2019, up from 160 people in 2012—who each spend a few hours a week deciding whether new tags should be treated as synonyms or subsets of existing tags, or simply left alone. AO3's Tag Wrangling Chairs estimate that the group is on track to wrangle over 2 million never-before-used tags in 2019, up from around 1.5 million in 2018.

Laissez-faire and rigid tagging systems both fail because they assume too much—that users can create order from a completely open system, or that a predefined taxonomy can encompass every kind of tag a person might ever want. When these assumptions don't pan out, it always seems to be the user's fault. AO3's beliefs about human nature are more pragmatic, like an architect designing pathways where pedestrians have begun wearing down the grass, recognizing how variation and standardization can fit together. The wrangler system is one where ordinary user behavior can be successful, a system which accepts that users periodically need help from someone with a bird's-eye view of the larger picture.

These are co-occurrence graphs for the tag ‘Romy’ on Tumblr, AO3 and Etsy respectively. Data was collected on all available instances of the ‘Romy’ tag in 2016. Graphics are taken from my PhD thesis, Serious Leisure in the digital world: exploring the information behaviour of fan communities. Thanks to @destinationtoast for the awesome Python code that actually made this possible. <3

You can view larger versions of the graphs on this post.

TUMBLR

Entire dataset (ZOOM IN):

The most interconnected tags (betweeness centrality +1):

ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN

Entire dataset (it was huge - tagging on AO3 is so complex and granular in general) (ZOOM IN):

The most interconnected tags (betweeness centrality +1) (ZOOM IN):

ETSY

Entire dataset (Etsy was the least complex) (ZOOM IN):

The most interconnected tags (betweeness centrality +1) (ZOOM IN):