Local Authorial Voice and Global Authorial Voice in Community-Authored Knowledge Organization Systems

Folksonomies are crowdsourced knowledge organization systems that rose to popularity during Web 2.0 and that are still actively used today. This crowdsourced approach to knowledge organization moves authorial voice from an individual expert or small group of experts to the community. What does it mean to have many voices contribute to a knowledge organization system? Do community members create a collective authorial voice? Are minority opinions more readily included? How does access to information, especially “long tail” information, change? This paper explores these questions by examining authorial voice in community-authored knowledge organization systems (CAKOS) and expert-authored knowledge organization systems (EAKOS).