Metacrap

In art, as in language, “cutting out the metacrap” means to get at the “core” meaning beneath the “superficial form” of a work; what it seems to be is different from what it means.

Clearly the layers of pretense and self-awareness and metacrap are thick.

In this vein, amusing to hear (the first time) was Lieberman’s recounting how, at an international conference on language, Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher, gave a presentation on “the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology” (“the kind of highfalutin metacrap you like, Kunzman,” Lieberman later commented).

People who refer to the metacrap argument are generally advocating “letting the software sort it out” instead of asking people to explicitly tag everything before making any contribution.

More formally we can say that the metadata is fragile or inconsistent. More forcefully this has been described as 'metacrap'.

The contributors may have certain bias and personal agenda (e.g., to allure visitors to a resource) in entering tags not relevant to the resources at all, thus the tags may be a collection of “metacrap” (Doctorow 2001).