Since CWE is intended to facilitate communication, it must support multiple stakeholders. In the past year, we have been developing multiple views that serve different purposes and audiences. Each view selects and organizes the appropriate content in a manner that makes the most sense for its intended audience.
Before Draft 8, CWE only provided one way of organizing data, in a roughly hierarchical fashion. This scheme borrowed heavily from multiple past efforts, including Seven Pernicious Kingdoms [7PK], [CLASP], [PLOVER], and Landwehr et al. [Landwehr]. It also used content from many different sources with different perspectives.
In the early stages of CWE's development, many different people took turns at building up and maintaining the CWE content, which led to many inconsistent classifications. This reduced the utility of the tree for navigation and browsing, sometimes making it difficult for a user to find the proper CWE ID to use for a weakness, leading to frustration and mapping errors. This also made it easier for CWE maintainers to accidentally introduce a duplicate entry.
These problems were exacerbated by the prevalence of inconsistent or vague terminology within CWE names and descriptions. Some of these terminology problems are endemic to the security industry, some were inherited from previous sources that CWE used, and some were introduced by the CWE team itself.