> del.icio.us doesn't seem to care much about these issue.  Nor does amazon.
> To think that amazon doesn't care about the 'integrity' of its data is
> ridiculous.  It's perfectly reasonable to delineate certain regions as
> 'user editable' (and therefore ignorable, if you so desire) without
> scrapping the entire concept.


I'm sure Amazon does care about these issues, but they also have deep
pockets, a compliance team, etc.  They are also large enough to play the
"we're too big to possibly monitor everything our users do" card, and use
the same model as eBay - letting the users do the quality control instead.

del.icio.us is a somewhat different animal, being based around end-user
input as their primary content.

My point was not that the concept should be scrapped - just that the
cost/benefit ratio should be examined before jumping into something that
is cool and trendy.  Tagging *is* useful; all I'm saying is that we
shouldn't "geek first and ask questions later" and so I'm asking the
painful questions right at the outset, before they get the chance to play
out in the real world.

The trolls should be less prevalent than the simply mistaken, but can
cause much more trouble.  I'm thinking less of raw data integrity, and
more of blown-out-of-all-proportion pseudo-scandal.  Witness the recent
incident where (IIRC) Wal*Mart's database was, for apparently innocent
reasons, recommending various ape/monkey movies/books as "related items"
to an MLK Jr biography, creating an outrage over a *perception* of bias,
true or not.

Ed's point about the tags being tied to the submitting user so that
obvious troublemakers can be blocked is a good one - one that should have
occurred to me, but that's why we're having the discussion.  That doesn't
address more subtle problems - theoretically, having a large enough
userbase to drown out the ignorant or malicious entries with good ones
will take care of it, but not everyone has enough users (that will
actually enter tags) to make that work.