metacrap

English

Etymology

From meta- +‎ crap. The "metadata" sense was coined by Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author Cory Doctorow in 2001.

Noun

metacrap (uncountable)

1. (social sciences, derogatory) Metatheory, metanalysis, and other meta disciplines. [from 1992]
   • 1998, John Haiman, Talk Is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation, and the Evolution of Language‎^[1], page 118:

     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.

   • 2011, Joyce Cho and Višnja Rogošic, "Burning the Rules, PAJ: Journal of Performance and Art, Volume 33, Number 2, May 2011:

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

   • 2013, Larry Lefkowitz, The Critic, The Assistant Critic, and Victoria‎^[2], page 157:

     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).

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:metacrap.
2. (Internet, derogatory) Low-quality or unreliable metadata. [from 2001]
   • 2004, Christian Crumlish, The Power of Many‎^[3], page 246:

     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.

   • 2008, Duncan Grey, Getting the Buggers to Find Out: Information Skills and Learning How to Learn‎^[4], page 175:

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

   • 2009, Hongwei Zhu, Harris Wu, “Sloppy Tags and Metacrap?: Quality of User Contributed Tags in Collaborative Social Tagging Systems”, in Proceedings of the Fifteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, San Francisco, California August 6th-9th 2009‎^[5], page 1:

     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).

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:metacrap.