Even when there’s a positive benefit to creating good metadata, people steadfastly refuse to exercise care and diligence in their metadata creation.
Take eBay: every seller there has a damned good reason for double-checking their listings for typos and misspellings. Try searching for “plam” on eBay. Right now, that turns up nine typoed listings for “Plam Pilots.” Misspelled listings don’t show up in correctly-spelled searches and hence garner fewer bids and lower sale-prices. You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot at eBay.
The fine (and gross) points of literacy — spelling, punctuation, grammar — elude the vast majority of the Internet’s users. To believe that J. Random Users will suddenly and en masse learn to spell and punctuate — let alone accurately categorize their information according to whatever hierarchy they’re supposed to be using — is self-delusion of the first water.
2.4 Mission: Impossible — know thyself
In meta-utopia, everyone engaged in the heady business of describing stuff carefully weighs the stuff in the balance and accurately divines the stuff’s properties, noting those results.
Simple observation demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption. When Nielsen used log-books to gather information on the viewing habits of their sample families, the results were heavily skewed to Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street. Replacing the journals with set-top boxes that reported what the set was actually tuned to showed what the average American family was really watching: naked midget wrestling, America’s Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgeries and Jerry Springer presents: “My daughter dresses like a slut!”
Ask a programmer how long it’ll take to write a given module, or a contractor how long it’ll take to fix your roof. Ask a laconic Southerner how far it is to the creek. Better yet, throw darts — the answer’s likely to be just as reliable.
People are lousy observers of their own behaviors. Entire religions are formed with the goal of helping people understand themselves better; therapists rake in billions working for this very end.
Why should we believe that using metadata will help J. Random User get in touch with her Buddha nature?