What would you think about a casual/emergent ontology, like the way fan fiction is tagged, or like Wikidata? I realize these are very different approaches, but people are already putting in huge effort to categorize content just out of their own passion, and I'm curious what you would think of a user-generated approach.
AO3's system was actually what I was comparing the idea to, mentally. Running AO3 does take a fair amount of $ (although a lot of it does go towards legal and server costs), and the tagging system is centrally managed. I think that people would do that for fanfiction because the people doing it get something out of it, whereas not enough people would benefit from a more expanded trigger ontology. People will fund things that benefit themselves ("Alright, I can find my Kirk/Spock stuff, sweet!") over things that benefit a small population in which they're not included.
And the second problem remains. I do not trust volunteers to treat my PTSD experience with any respect. The type of person who would volunteer to do this are likely to be either people who have PTSD themselves (which represents a burden on them/is likely to be difficult/might possibly not be emotionally stable enough to do this work well) OR the virtue signaling/social control type. I've seen too much open grifting and hypocrisy from progressives to trust randoms claiming to want to help us.
Part of what I'm asserting though is that it would be generally useful to people, because they may be filtering for what others are filtering against. Say that you have a phobia of frogs. You can filter out frogs, but someone researching them can filter for them .
I mistook how AO3 works. I guess I'm thinking more like Tumblr or Flickr. Say it isn't centrally organized. We're just tagging them likes we sees 'em. So someone creates the frog tag because they want to use it and it doesn't exist. Then they tag something because it has a frog. It never crosses their minds that someone may have a frog phobia; the filtering is done by the frog fearer themselves, so it isn't disclosed to bullies who might use it against them, or anyone else they want to keep it from for reasons of their own privacy.
There's still problems here, one person may read `frog` and another `frogs`, mistakes can be made, things can be mistagged deliberately, etc. but I think there's promise to the approach.
If you have resources to recommend on library science, I'd be keenly interested.
