Interesting posting by Liz Lawley on how players of CMU’s picture classification game game the system. The players quickly discover that there certian schemes garner more points than others. Liz illustrates a number of examples where that tags the pictures with less than optiminal tags.

I have a bone to pick with the folksonomy fans. It seems to me that these folks have never met a institution they found worthy. The larger the institution the less worthy it’s outputs. Or in short: individuals good, institutions bad.

Let’s adopt that mindset and look at what Liz uncovered. The players in this game develop more allegence to the game than then classificaion task. They strive to supress thier individual knowledge. They attempt to socialized their behavior to that of their model player. Oh my God! Look! It’s group think.