Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Authority (11 Oct 2005) Now don't get me wrong. I like tags as much as the next geek. And I enjoy the revolutionary rhetoric of the free-tagging movement, to a point. But when Tim O'Reilly, the publisher behind the lemur and polar bear books, starts predicting the death of taxonomy, it's time to set the record straight. You see, tags are only the visible, superficial symbols of a much deeper, more interesting revolution in findability and authority. Wikipedia doesn't beat Britannica because it has better folksonomies. It wins because it's more findable. And its success didn't come without structure. In fact, the Wikipedia has a traditional information architecture (with strong design conventions and a fixed left-hand navigation bar) and a traditional governance model (with Jimbo Wales and his Board of Trustees as the ultimate corporate authority). Article URL: http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000057.php Read 14 more articles from Semantic Studios sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Ambient Findability: Findability Hacks          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy