Taxonomy by All

Wikipedia is often disparaged as a reliable source because anyone can edit any entry at any time. So given that history, how credible would a taxonomy be that was built by crowdsourcing? Some interesting information about one such attempt was found on The Daily, a publication of the University of Washington, in their article, “Playing to the crowd.

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Outlining the World (and Its Parts)

As we have seen, there were a lot of early philosophers who outlined the world as they saw it. While that’s an ambitious undertaking (especially for academic trailblazers), they truly built an outline; they truly built a taxonomy of the world as they saw it.

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Predictability is Not a Bad Thing

We know that building a taxonomy is not easy. It requires research, building of terms, identifying criteria, and the list goes on and on. And we all know that it doesn’t always go smoothly and in predictable order.

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Points of Knowledge

To deal with a large body of knowledge, we need to localize and organize it somehow. Where that knowledge is located, or where and how it is organized, or the system by which it is identified and perhaps indexed, might be called the points of knowledge. And certainly, databases connected to and/or indexed with knowledge organization systems represent points of knowledge.

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Trekkie Taxonomy

You know my fascination with unique applications of taxonomies. What you don’t know is how much of a sci-fi fan my husband is. So if I failed to report on this little gem, well, I might have to sleep on your couch for awhile. As the third story in a multi-part series on taxonomy and speciation, this look at the infamous tricorder and how it relates to taxonomies, is an interesting read.

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Recycling Treasures

Once again my search for the odd and illusive taxonomies have resulted in a treasure. “Taxonomy of trash” was brought to us by Philly.com and it didn’t fail to entertain and intrigue me.

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