This paper explores the knowledge organization landscape in which Hope Olson’s numerous contri- butions to the field are situated. The paper first explores some of the foundational conceptual notions within knowledge organization that today are well-accepted. The paper then reviews Hope Olson’s contributions to that landscape and places her work in the context of Bor- ges’ essay about John Wilkins’ project to develop a universal language that would organize and contain all human thought. The paper shows how Hope Olson’s work on marginalization and exclusion of specific topics and groups of people in large library classification has unraveled the systemic bias found in all classifications. The paper calls for stronger engagement between scholarship and practice to ad- dress marginalization and exclusion in further work on classification systems.