folksonomy

English

Etymology

Blend of folk +‎ taxonomy

Noun

folksonomy (countable and uncountable, plural folksonomies)

1. (Internet, uncountable) The spontaneous cooperation of a group of people to organize information into categories; the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.
2. (Internet, countable) A user-generated taxonomy.
   • 2011, Charles Wankel, Educating Educators with Social Media, page 291:

     We imagined a microlibrary which would be a well organized digital collection of resources, focused specifically on our project, and employing both traditional library cataloging and organization, and the folksonomy made possible by user-generated tagging.

Related terms

• folk taxonomy