"Social tagging as a knowledge organization and resource discovery tool" by Hesham Allam

In his article, Allam defines social tagging as a process which "can be performed by anyone by freely attaching keywords or tags to describe the content of a Webpage [emphasis mine]." He further goes on to state that this is unlike traditional indexing, where "experts are needed to catalogue and create metadata to describe search terms for efficient retrieval."

Now, I don't want to continuously harp on this subject (and come off as "elitist"), but there is a reason why the "experts" are "needed" in certain cases, and that is to get the job done right.

Of course, it is impossible to "catalog" the entire Internet, but relying on amateur content organizers (as Wichowski described them) will always introduce its own set of problems (misidentification, spelling errors, spam etc.) ... That is why, in terms of the library profession, social tagging should be seen - at least in its current form - as a supplementary extension of the process of acquiring information for patrons.

There's been a lot of successful cases of the implementation of social tagging within the library field (this site has some good information on the subject), but the point should not be to totally supplant the "traditional" methods ... Again, to tackle the entire internet via those traditional methods is not an option, but there is room for both systems - folksonomies and controlled vocabularies - to exist within the burgeoning information environment that we now find ourselves in.