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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
What does it mean to organize? Here is my definition:
Organize is to arrange something into categories or an order
I believe that the word 'organize' refers to particular types of arrangements and does not refer to all types of arrangements. For example, the Eiffel Tower is an arrangement of iron pieces but I would not say that the pieces are organized. The pieces of the Eiffel Tower follow an overall design and multiple patterns, but there is not a set of categories or an ordering system for the pieces. But if the pieces of the Eiffel Tower were disassembled and sorted by shape, that would be organized because it would be following a set of categories. Or if the pieces were sorted smallest to largest, that would also be organized because it would be following an ordering system.
Although Google's current mission is, "...to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", I do not believe that Google Search adequately organizes the world's information for public use. Besides providing algorithmic rankings of links ordered by 'relevance', Google Search does not arrange the world's information, but instead it is an extendible arm for retrieving information. If Google actually organized the world's information, it would look more like a directory, a yellow pages or an even an encyclopedia.
Although it's not perfect, I believe that Wikipedia is relatively organized, both within each article and in the overall structure. The contents of each Wikipedia article are arranged according to a consistent method (the encyclopedic standard), and Wikipedia also has a directory of vital articles to organize the overall structure of the encyclopedia. For example, there are currently 10,008 level 4 vital articles organized into 11 sections with subsections.
In my opinion, one of the biggest shortcomings that Wikipedia has towards organizing the world's information is that each article is focused on a concept rather than a chunk of information. To describe 'chunking', Wikipedia says,
"...chunking is a process by which small individual pieces of a set of information are bound together to create a meaningful whole later on in memory." (Wikipedia: Chunking (psychology), 3.5.24 UTC 16:56)
Chunking allows information to exist in a more granular medium which I believe allows greater precision when organizing and arranging pieces of information in a directory, compared to organizing a list of encyclopedia articles. Since each encyclopedia article is based on a entire concept, I believe it has too much information to be a precise way to organize information. In this regard, I believe that an encyclopedia article is not the ideal base unit to organize the world's information.
To conclude this blog post, I should mention that my preferred method of chunking is the information blogging guidelines (IBG) which I first proposed in 2022. IBG provides a consistent method for displaying a chunk of information that is clear and dynamic. I hope that one day IBG can be used to organize the world's information into a decentralized network of directories.