Interesting to see that Stack Overflow are rolling out a more extensive curated folksonomy system. The linked blog post talks about how a pure folksonomy (i.e. freeform tagging) reached a point of unwieldiness, and they’re now allowing the community to merge tags/mark them as synonyms.
This seems quite similar to the OTW’s Archive Of Our Own “Tag Wrangling” project for fannish metadata (fandoms, characters, etc).
Does anyone know of any other curated folksonomies out there? That is, a freeform tagging system with a layer of curation over the top to even out some of the stranger quirks of a purely anarchic system.
The Curated folksonomies by Alex Bayley, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
LibraryThing works the way you’re describing, doesn’t it?
Librarything.com had the first tag combining system I encountered, a couple of years before OTW came along.
MediaWiki categories can be used as a freeform tagging system (with hierarchy included), but in practice to be useful, there needs to be heavy curating on top. categories in wiki land are almost uniformly seen as a way of adding usefulness for all users, cf. delicious, Flickr(?) where usefulness rises out of the ashes of thousands of users only using tags for their own purposes.