I tell people that I’m a professional writer, but this is a bit misleading, because what I really do is figure out how to organize information so that it’s useful and usable. Anyone, with sufficient training and practice, can figure out how to convey simple facts in plain language, but figuring out how to organize simple facts in plain language into a coherent text is the more important part of my job and work.

This post and the “Information Debt” wiki page, begin to address some of these the problem of information resource maintenance, organization, and institutional practices with regards to information and knowledge resources.

Organization is hard. Really hard. One of the challenges for digital resources is that they lack all of the conventions of /technical-writing/books, which would seem to be freeing: you get more space and you get the opportunity to do really flexible categorization and organization things.

Great right?

Right.

Really flexible and powerful taxonomic systems, like tagging systems have a number of problems when applied to large information resources:

  • the relationship between the “scope” of the tag, and the specificity of the tag matters a lot. Too much. Problems arise when:
  • tags are really specific, pages include a number of pieces of information, and tags can only map to pages.
  • tags are general and the resources all address similar or related topics.
  • the size of the tag “buckets” matters as well. If there are too many items with a tag, users will find not the tag for answering their questions.
  • if your users or applications have added additional functionality using tags, tags begin to break as a useful taxonomic system. For example, if your system attaches actions to specific tags (i.e. send email alerts when content with a specific tag,) or if you use a regular notation to simulate a hierarchy, then editors begin adding content to tags, not for taxonomic reasons, but for workflow reasons or to trigger the system.

The resulting organization isn’t useful from a textual perspective.

  • If you have to have multiple tagging systems or namespaces.

    Using namespaces is powerful, and helps prevent collisions. At the same Sat Aug 16 10:50:00 2014, if your taxonomic system has collisions, this points to a larger problem.

  • If the taxonomy ever has more than one term for a conceptual facet, then the tagging system is broken.

These problems tend to exacerbate as:

  • the resource ages.
  • the number of contributors grow.

There’s this core paradox in tagging systems: To tag content effectively, you need a fix list of potential tags before you begin tagging content, and you need to be very familiar with the corpus of tagged contentbefore* beginning to tag content.*

And there’s not much you can do to avoid it. To further complicate the problem, it’s essentially impossible to “redo” a taxonomic system for sufficiently large resources given the time requirements for reclassification and the fact that classification systems and processes are difficult to automate.

The prevalence of tagging systems and the promises of easy, quick taxonomic organization are hard to avoid and counteract. As part of the fight against information debt it’s important to draw attention to the failure of broken taxonomy systems. We need, as technical writers, information custodians, and “knowledge workers,” to develop approaches to organization that are easy to implement and less likely to lead to huge amounts of information debt.