“What we call “metadata” is just one instance of a much broader categorizating that it’s hard to imagine we could do without.”

Sure. Categorizing is a survival behavior — is this one of those “dangerous” things I need to hide/run away from? Is this plant “poisonous”? Etc.

“Adding information in this way seems to be very fundamental to the way we form conceptual models about information.”

That’s an interesting way to think about modelling. Slightly different from the class-inheritance stuff I studied in Artificial Intelligence (old-school, ontologies for AIs, etc.).

Anyway, most of the Wikipedia listed critiques of metadata seemed to miss the point. For example, the claims that metadata is expensive and that there is really no limit to how much metadata you could associated with a given dataset.

Now certainly, if we try to get an unlimited amount of metadata it will be very expensive, but most of us are only going to care about a small number of specific contexts which metadata can be used to describe. For example, most of us aren’t going to want a photo tagged with the names of everyone in a crowd at a soccer match, but if I know my daughter is in the picture, I’m going to tag it with her name. To say I’d then need/want to tag it with everyone else’s name is absurd (this seems a bit like saying that metadata is a bad idea because a picture of the Earth from space could potentially contain metadate for the names of everyone who has ever lived…these same like silly straw men claims).

What we call “metadata” is just one instance of a much broader categorizating that it’s hard to imagine we could do without. Long before we were adding metadata to essays describing game, for example, we have organizational systems for books that would divide them physically into a game category broadly and then in subcategories like baseball, basketball, etc.

Adding information in this way seems to be very fundamental to the way we form conceptual models about information.

The only real problem is the silly top-down enterprise solutions that turn it into a meaningless buzzword.