Chapter 1 - Introduction

The Internet and social media offer enormous new possibilities for curiosity, ingenuity, creativity and resilience. And over the last two decades they have transformed the way we find and share our ideas, information and knowledge.

Search engines, with Google as a pioneer, and recently also AI chatbots, offer fast ways to find answers to many questions.

Open online encyclopedias exist in many languages. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and is available in over 300 languages.

Microblogs like Twitter, launched in 2006, now X, Bluesky and Mastodon or social platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and many others, offer incredible sharing possibilities and great retrieval options when hashtags are used intelligently.

Despite all the opportunities offered by the Internet and social media, the localization of knowledge, as described by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz at the launch of the Global Development Network (2000), proceeds at a slow pace. Information overload in major languages and the insufficient supply of content in most languages and on many topics contribute to slow learning for more sustainable and inclusive development.

What can we do to make better use of the Internet and social media?

Wikinetix’s mission is to promote and demonstrate the joint impact of four digital skills, the first of which can be considered an atomic habit:

  • #tagcoding means that one uses standardized hashtags to relate online information to specific topics in order to structure and retrieve it easily;
  • #xy2wiki is about creating a wiki that explains tagcoding hashtags in as many languages as possible;
  • #tag2wiki is about creating, maintaining and coordinating wikis for development communications;
  • #lean2book is about creating and publishing e-books that leverage the #tagcoding and #tag2wiki wikis.

This e-book has built-in links that make navigating the included reference materials as easy as navigating a wiki. At each level of the hierarchy of contents are tables of contents with links forward to lower-level sections and backward to higher levels. This way, it only takes three or four clicks to get to the specific content of a part, or to return to the part from the more specific content. Of course, the e-book readers also support term search.

The knowledge localization model #tagcoding - #xy2wiki - #tag2wiki - #lean2book offers several features to accelerate knowledge localization and public debate. While #tagcoding is a digital skill available to everyone, the #xy2wiki, #tag2wiki and #lean2book skills require an extra investment of time and means. One #xy2wiki mission is the creation of a multidimensional thematic wiki in any local language through topic-based translation of a reference wiki. Once such a wiki is in place, it can support the curation of content - tagged for a country or local government unit - in the languages of the country or locality, the discovery of forgotten topics, and the rapid provision through translation of new reference content.

Therefore, a #tagcoding - #xy2wiki - #tag2wiki - #lean2book movement is a general-purpose collaborative countermeasure to information overload, (epistemic) polarization into bubbles that no longer meet and other imperfections of mainstream Internet and social media. The proposed coding hashtags and corresponding provision of wikis will empower users in the discursive, instructive and productive use of both the Internet and social media, enable a willingness to listen, and help overcome the polarizing forces of social media algorithms.

How you exploit #tagcoding and the other digital skills that build on it is up to you to explore and learn. It depends on where you are in your personal development and the responsibilities you have taken on in business or society. This e-book is intended to be a companion for the first episode of your #tagcoding journey.

You can also get guidance and inspiration about your possible uses for tags and wikis by exploring one of these open access online resources:

The hashtags cover topics that interest active and thoughtful people from all possible professions and fields of study, in all countries of the world and in all spoken languages.

By #tagcoding social media and online content, we can make it globally discoverable and retrievable as if it were in one’s personal library.

On the Internet, this library is globally accessible. Using the territorial hashtags #WWlgu we can create relevant local sections in the global online library. The hashtag #2030library and a dedicated part of the Wikinetix website explore this topic in more detail.

If the tagged content is open access, it becomes part of the public part of that #2030library.

As long as there are social media platforms and search engines that support hashtags, you, your favorite authors, your students, your teachers, and your peers can use systematically defined hashtags to share, discover, and retrieve content.

To the chapter

Summary

The second chapter outlines the reasons for using systematically defined hashtags and explains the digital competencies that are involved if the practice is to be scaled up. The desire for global scaling up should be understood as a continuation of the history of knowledge creation and accessibility.

Each of the following five parts presents hashtags and class descriptions for a specific thematic dimension.

  • Part II presents hashtags for the sections, divisions, groups and classes of the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC revision 4).
  • Part III presents the hashtags for divisions, groups and classes of the Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG).
  • Part IV presents the hashtags for the Sustainable Development Goals and Targets.
  • Part V presents the hashtags for the sections and divisions of the Central Product Classification (CPC).
  • Part VI presents the hashtags for states and counties. The numeric codes in these hashtags are based on the FIPS GeoID’s.

Part VII includes two Annexes:

  • Annex 1 lists all the countries and territories in the world, each with its ISO 3166 country code and generic coding hashtags for some of the dimensions covered in this manual: #cofog, #isic and #lgu.
  • Annex 2 describes some features of this e-book that support easy navigation through its 300 pages.

Part VIII lists a few references and a brief remark about the author.

To the chapter

#tagcoding: a new digital skill?

In its electronic version, “#tagcoding in the US” aims to be a companion in your exploration of new digital skills that have the potential to transform the way American and other citizens use the Internet and social media. What is at stake is a digital transformation that equips you with tools better suited to meet the great challenges of our time.

This e-book provides #tagcoding conventions for a globally shared multidimensional thematic map with over one hundred thousand topics important for development, personal, public and socio-economic. Codes for sustainable development goals, products and services, economic activities, government functions, can be combined with state, country and county codes to form hashtags for specific topics such as fighting poverty in a state or county. In fact, depending on the specific interest of users, or purpose of a campaign, a single hashtag can be created out of billions to support knowledge sharing on a very specific topic, for instance, on #FlintWaterCrisis: #cofog0630 for Water Supply in Flint, Genesee County (#US26049) (Michigan): #cofog0630US26049. But less specific hashtags may also be used as you may discover by looking up #US26049 in Google or X.

In a sense, we propose a coordination of the thematic space, which is similar to the Cartesian coordinate geometry for space and time. In the thematic space, the thematic dimensions are sustainable development goals, economic activities, governance functions, territorial locality and language. Coordination of the thematic space brings superior expressive adequacy and computational efficiency in digital social exchange, localization of knowledge and articulation of shared and differentiated responsibility.

Searching this e-book can be a first step in a broader engagement with systematized content that already includes tens of thousands of wiki pages, or when you feel like sharing a good read, a brilliant idea, or when you need high quality or recent content or speeches about a sustainable development goal or target, a city, a municipality, a sector of industry, or a government function in a country.

In addition to this e-book and the #tagcoding pivots, other online tools have been defined to support quick and easy discovery of the coding hashtag for a specific topic. See the #tagcoding handbook for more information on these tools and other #tagcoding proposals.

Up next

Chapter 2 - #tagcoding: why everyone should do it, and how to do it