The Wisdom of the Few? "Supertaggers" in Collaborative Tagging Systems

TL;DR

This study investigates the role of 'supertaggers' in collaborative tagging systems, revealing they dominate tagging activity and differ significantly from other users in behavior, motivation, and expertise, challenging the idea of crowd wisdom.

Contribution

The paper introduces a formal definition of supertaggers, analyzes their distinct behaviors, and examines how their influence impacts the effectiveness of folksonomies.

Findings

Supertaggers generate most annotations in folksonomies.

Supertaggers focus more on less popular items.

Differences in tagging patterns relate to expertise and motivation.

Abstract

A folksonomy is ostensibly an information structure built up by the "wisdom of the crowd", but is the "crowd" really doing the work? Tagging is in fact a sharply skewed process in which a small minority of "supertagger" users generate an overwhelming majority of the annotations. Using data from three large-scale social tagging platforms, we explore (a) how to best quantify the imbalance in tagging behavior and formally define a supertagger, (b) how supertaggers differ from other users in their tagging patterns, and (c) if effects of motivation and expertise inform our understanding of what makes a supertagger. Our results indicate that such prolific users not only tag more than their counterparts, but in quantifiably different ways. Specifically, we find that supertaggers are more likely to label content in the long tail of less popular items, that they show differences in patterns of content tagged and terms utilized, and are measurably different with respect to tagging expertise and motivation. These findings suggest we should question the extent to which folksonomies achieve crowdsourced classification via the "wisdom of the crowd", especially for broad folksonomies like Last.fm as opposed to narrow folksonomies like Flickr.