hutcheson - 4:07 am on Dec 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

Well, there is one other set of users -- most accesses to dmoz.org are presumably from volunteer editors. And the editors are always discussing or trying out changes, with a view towards determining whether they WOULD be improvements.

Our forums includes "quality feedback", "general issues", and "bugs and features", and from site suggestors (who are a mixed bag of volunteers and vandals, no surprise...) we've gotten a fairly large sampling of opinions.

Most of them really aren't realistic -- imposing a new model by force from outside, or installing a process Fuhrer, or chaining the important volunteers to keyboards, deliberately making site suggestions harder, or some such impractical nonsense. Or they aren't constructive -- just scurrilously vague or ostentatiously arrogant handwaving "your site sucks, you don't do what I want, do something about it NOW."

The number of volunteer site suggesters who complain that the site suggestion process is too hard to use, has been very small -- and even those mostly not really fluent in English. The only thing that seems to be a pattern is people saying they have trouble finding the right category; so editors are even now discussing how that might be made simpler.

But this is an inherent issue with hierarchical directories, we may improve but will never totally solve it. For that matter, some people really don't care for the idea of a directory anyway. I certainly wouldn't want to force everyone to use one. And the last person you'd want making suggestions about how a directory should be organized, is the person who really doesn't like directories at all!