LizardGroupie - 7:16 pm on Jan 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

The ODP didn't invent conflict of interest. It occurs in the real world every day, and honest people have to learn to cope with it. Every week thousands of church treasurers collect millions of dollars, and account for it faithfully. Of the dozens of U.S. presidents elected, most neither stole the silverware nor sexually assaulted the help. (Only one did both, IIRC.)

Again, this should all be painfully obvious even to the most casual observer. In nearly any organization (volunteer and professional) 10% of the people do 90% of the work.

We have more than 50,000 listings invalidated by website changes every quarter! And we have more spam submittals than that every month! (And spam, not inactive editors, is the sole cause of the backlog, as I've explained multiple times, at least once with supporting arithmetic detail. Do the math if you don't believe it. Get a sixth-grader to help if you need it.)

Another obvious consequence is that the way to success is to attract the right 10% of the people. Social engineering is therefore essential. Building a community of independent volunteers who trust each other to care about the right thing involves -- trusting them to do the right thing. (Duh...) And you have to show people you won't tolerate breaches of that trust (as the U.S. Catholic Church has been emphatically reminded recently).

So the ODP founders designed those characteristics into the model. And it worked. The ODP is by far the largest of the web directories, and the most comprehensive. It is the least affected by editor bias (because by design we have such a large pool of different biases to draw from). It is the least affected by self-selection of websites, because of our aggressive approach to using multiple sources of research, and our emphasis on the primacy of editor selection. As to reliability, it was the first to address several forms of link rot effectively.

That is what actually happened. One could imagine another world where the ODP founder absconded with all the capital raised (it happens, even to churches!) and the ODP never started. One could imagine another world in which the ODP sponsor dropped sponsorship, and the directory died. (it has happened to other directories!) One could imagine a directory in which self-interest overwhelmed altruism in the editing community (I could name a couple where that happened.)

But the ODP has avoided multiple failure modes. Surely that is partly because its founders thought about them and prepared procedures that have proven adequate to oversee the potential problems -- and address them.