Friendica Social Network (Leipzig)

The ugly ducking theorem has relevance for all efforts at organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_duckling_theorem

Put simply, it states that all categorization systems are fundamentally arbitrary, once all possible attributes are considered.

It's basically "proof" that common sense is contextual. For me it shows that you need to deeply engage with the people who need to find (and return) the stuff, and always include "uncategorized" for the stuff that slips between the perfect system.

#informationArchitecture

Copy-pasta from Wikipedia:

"Watanabe's example, using objects A, B, C, and properties F ("first"), W ("white"). "0", "1", "¬", "∧", "∨", and "⊕" denote "false", "true", "not", "and", "or", and "exclusive or", respectively. Since F happens to imply W, each predicate that can be formed from F and W coincides with another one, hence there are only 8 extensionally distinct possible predicates, each shown on an own line. The white ducklings A and B agree on 4 of them (line 2, 3, 4, 8), but so do A and C, too (line 3, 5, 7, 8), and so do B and C (line 1, 3, 6, 8)."

#informationarchitecture

Doug Webb 2 Wochen her •

Like, all organization a genuinely _hard_ problem, and yet still necessary and practiced.

As much as I love tags (and I really do) nested folders are not going any time soon. Full-text search is, thankfully, getting good in more and more places.

Very interested to chat more on this topic.

Kat 2 Wochen her •

I've actually abandoned tags altogether.
Like many things in this area, I need to write commentary about it.

William Pietri 2 Wochen her •

Totally agreed! One of my most popular tweets was something like, "Anybody who thinks a taxonomy can be perfect and universal should try unloading a dishwasher in somebody else's kitchen." My point being that any practical organization system is very specific to the needs and capacities at hand.

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