Knowledge Organization (KO) is published by IMR Press from Volume 52 Issue 1 (2025). Previous articles were published by another publisher under the CC-BY licence, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement.
Systems of Classification and Categorization as Revealing Tensions Within Knowledge
Evelyne Broudoux 1
Affiliation
Article Info
1 Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), Institut National des Techniques de Documentation (INTD), Dispositifs d’Information et de Communication à l’Ère Numérique (DICEN-IDF), Paris, France
Abstract
Knowledge organization systems are likely to reveal disagreements and controversies in the construction of knowledge. This article looks at the social tensions reflected in the use of terms such as "race" or typical expressions like "woke" or "cancel culture". It compares the use of these terms in the French-speaking world between Wiki-pedia and the Rameau subject headings. It first examines the operational functioning of Rameau's indexing language for libraries, then that of the French Wikipedia's categorization system, and finally explores their differences and similarities in the use of the terms presented.