zerotre - 2:18 pm on Jul 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

A little contribution to the discussion from my (limited) experience and perspective.

I have been a DMOZ editor for 6 years now, in a regional non-US tourist niche I know well. From this limited perspective, I would like to say to most of those angry at Dmoz that editing is a very engaging activity, with over 2 thirds of the submissions out of place, descriptions exaggerated, submissions of sites still largely under construction, or flash homepages that require long to load. I always visit a number of pages, to see whether the site complies with the guidelines, is not a clone or duplicate content (which is ever more difficult to establish), is not spamming with deeplinks or subdomains. So I do not list 2 sites out of 3 on the average, for different reasons. Only about 1 out of 10 submissions needs no editing. Submitters mostly do not read the guidelines, are in a hurry and superficial, and pretend editors to do the cleaning for them. If webmasters and submitters would just stop and think and try to comply with the submission rules in their requested category, as well as read the descriptions already edited of sites published in that category to have a gist of what they should write, the editing process would be smoother and faster.

In 60 minutes I may insert 15 websites. Submissions usually exceed the about 40 sites every day that I would examine in an hour's time, considering that from what I see rarely another editor visits my cat. And then there are the reds, the sites that disappear that must be checked.

And of course I cannot spare 60 minutes every day, since I also have a life and have to earn living for my family, which all added means I am chronically backlogged in my category.

But I believe DMOZ, whether larger, the same or smaller, to be a great mostly unbiased contribution to the whole internet community. And "old" editors, though they may not work at the same pace as they did in the earliest years, are of paramount importance in keeping standards and continuity.