There’s a knowingly ridiculous thread at Reddit at the moment: Which world leader would win if pitted against other leaders in a fight to the death.

The title is a straightline begging for punchlines. And it is a funny thread. Yet, I found it shockingly informative. The shock comes from realizing just how poorly informed I am.

My first reaction to the title was “Putin, duh!” That just shows you what I know. From the thread I learned that Joseph Kabila (Congo) and Boyko Borisov (Bulgaria) would kick Putin’s ass. Not to mention that Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck (Bhutan), who would win on good looks.

Now, when I say that this thread is “shockingly informative,” I don’t mean that it gives sufficient or even relevant information about the leaders it discusses. After all, it focuses on their personal combat skills. Rather, it is an interesting example of the haphazard way information spreads when that spreading is participatory. So, we are unlikely to have sent around the Wikipedia article on Kabila or Borisov simply because we all should know about the people leading the nations of the world. Further, while there is more information about world leaders available than ever in human history, it is distributed across a huge mass of content from which we are free to pick and choose. That’s disappointing at the least and disastrous at its worst.

On the other hand, information is now passed around if it is made interesting, sometimes in jokey, demeaning ways, like an article that steers us toward beefcake (although the president of Ireland does make it up quite high in the Reddit thread). The information that gets propagated through this system is thus spotty and incomplete. It only becomes an occasion for serendipity if it is interesting, not simply because it’s worthwhile. But even jokey, demeaning posts can and should have links for those whose interest is piqued.

So, two unspectacular conclusions.

First, in our despair over the diminishing of a shared knowledge-base of important information, we should not ignore the off-kilter ways in which some worthwhile information does actually propagate through the system. Indeed, it is a system designed to propagate that which is off-kilter enough to be interesting. Not all of that “news,” however, is about water-skiing cats. Just most.

Second, we need to continue to have the discussion about whether there is in fact a shared news/knowledge-base that can be gathered and disseminated, whether there ever was, whether our populations ever actually came close to living up to that ideal, the price we paid for having a canon of news and knowledge, and whether the networking of knowledge opens up any positive possibilities for dealing with news and knowledge at scale. For example, perhaps a network is well-informed if it has experts on hand who can explain events at depth (and in interesting ways) on demand, rather than assuming that everyone has to be a little bit expert at everything.

I’m not sure how I came into possession of a copy of The Indexer, a publication by the Society of Indexers, but I thoroughly enjoyed it despite not being a professional indexer. Or, more exactly, because I’m not a professional indexer. It brings me joy to watch experts operate at levels far above me.

The issue of The Indexer I happen to have — Vol. 30, No,. 1, March 2012 — focuses on digital trends, with several articles on the Semantic Web and XML-based indexes as well as several on broad trends in digital reading and digital books, and on graphical visualizations of digital indexes. All good.

I also enjoyed a recurring feature: Indexes reviewed. This aggregates snippets of book reviews that mention the quality of the indexes. Among the positive reviews, the Sunday Telegraph thinks that for the book My Dear Hugh, “the indexer had a better understanding of the book than the editor himself.” That’s certainly going on someone’s resumé!

I’m not sure why I enjoy works of expertise in fields I know little about. It’s true that I know a little about indexing because I’ve written about the organization of digital information, and even a little about indexing. And I have a lot of interest in the questions about the future of digital books that happen to be discussed in this particular issue of The Indexer. That enables me to make more sense of the journal than might otherwise be the case. But even so, what I enjoy most are the discussions of topics that exhibit the professionals’ deep involvement in their craft.

But I think what I enjoy most of all is the discovery that something as seemingly simple as generating an index turns out to be indefinitely deep. There are endless technical issues, but also fathomless questions of principle. There’s even indexer humor. For example, one of the index reviews notes that Craig Brown’s The Lost Diaries “gives references with deadpan precision (‘Greer, Germaine: condemns Queen, 13-14…condemns pineapple, 70…condemns fat, thin and medium sized women, 93…condemns kangaroos,122′).”

As I’ve said before, everything is interesting if observed at the right level of detail.

Paul Deschner and I had a fascinating conversation yesterday with Jeffrey Wallman, head of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center about perhaps getting his group’s metadata to interoperate with the library metadata we’ve been gathering. The TBRC has a fantastic collection of Tibetan books. So we were talking about the schemas we use — a schema being the set of slots you create for the data you capture. For example, if you’re gathering information about books, you’d have a schema that has slots for title, author, date, publisher, etc. Depending on your needs, you might also include slots for whether there are color illustrations, is the original cover still on it, and has anyone underlined any passages. It turns out that the Tibetan concept of a book is quite a bit different than the West’s, which raises interesting questions about how to capture and express that data in ways that can be useful mashed up.

But it was when we moved on to talking about our author schemas that Jeffrey listed one type of metadata that I would never, ever have thought to include in a schema: reincarnation. It is important for Tibetans to know that Author A is a reincarnation of Author B. And I can see why that would be a crucial bit of information.

So, let this be a lesson: attempts to anticipate all metadata needs are destined to be surprised, sometimes delightfully.

The American Psychiatric Association has approved its new manual of diagnoses — Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — after five years of controversy [nytimes].

For example, it has removed Aspberger’s as a diagnosis, lumping it in with autism, but it has split out hoarding from the more general category of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Lumping and splitting are the two most basic activities of cataloguers and indexers. There are theoretical and practical reasons for sometimes lumping things together and sometimes splitting them, but they also characterize personalities. Some of us are lumpers, and some of us are splitters. And all of us are a bit of each at various times.

The DSM runs into the problems faced by all attempts to classify a field. Attempts to come up with a single classification for a complex domain try to impose an impossible order:

First, there is rarely (ever?) universal agreement about how to divvy up a domain. There are genuine disagreements about which principles of organization ought to be used, and how they apply. Then there are the Lumper vs. the Splitter personalities.

Second, there are political and economic motivations for dividing up the world in particular ways.

Third, taxonomies are tools. There is no one right way to divide up the world, just as there is no one way to cut a piece of plywood and no one right thing to say about the world. It depends what you’re trying to do. DSM has conflicting purposes. For one thing, it affects treatment. For example, the NY Times article notes that the change in the classification of bipolar disease “could ‘medicalize’ frequent temper tantrums,” and during the many years in which the DSM classified homosexuality as a syndrome, therapists were encouraged to treat it as a disease. But that’s not all the DSM is for. It also guides insurance payments, and it affects research.

Given this, do we need the DSM? Maybe for insurance purposes. But not as a statement of where nature’s joints are. In fact, it’s not clear to me that we even need it as a single source to define terms for common reference. After all, biologists don’t agree about how to classify species, but that science seems to be doing just fine. The Encyclopedia of Life takes a really useful approach: each species gets a page, but the site provides multiple taxonomies so that biologists don’t have to agree on how to lump and split all the forms of life on the planet.

If we do need a single diagnostic taxonomy, DSM is making progress in its methodology. It has more publicly entered the fray of argument, it has tried to respond to current thinking, and it is now going to be updated continuously, rather than every 5 years. All to the good.

But the rest of its problems are intrinsic to its very existence. We may need it for some purposes, but it is never going to be fully right…because tools are useful, not true.