hutcheson - 4:05 am on Jul 22, 2007 (gmt 0)

buckworks, I think you're getting the message accurately. Any attempt to do ANYTHING with the ODP for the benefit of a WEBSITE, is certainly abusive by definition -- it is misusing tools and privileges which were created and entrusted for a completely different purpose.

But no, you have not yet said anything that would suggest the sites you are talking about are actually listable. Now, the key to listability is actually very simple: that you've successfully avoided it suggests either intent or talent.

But for the record, there are certainly many sites which ARE listable and yet haven't been listed. And so?

-- Is it because of bias in favor of some other sites? It could be, because for some reason someone chose to review 50 million other sites first. But would it be LESS bias if that site had been reviewed earlier? No, it wouldn't. It would just be a DIFFERENT bias. What you're doing is imposing your own personal self-interest as a moral judge of other peoples' priorities. And that is as injust as it can be.

-- But the situation may not be bias. Is it simple chance? It could be: when I'm reviewing suggested sites, I tend to take them in a more-or-less random order (and when it gets down to it, any order is more-or-less random.) But would it have been something other than chance if that site had been reviewed earlier? No, it would not. It would just be differently loaded dice.

-- But might the situation be actual abuse: an editor suppressing the site because somehow he knows you, and somehow you have made yourself odious to him somehow. Now, unless you're well-known as an especially vicious person, this just really isn't likely. Surely, it can happen, but unless you also know the editor, it's extremely unlikely. For one thing, the vast majority of the edits are done by the most active editors--people who really have better things to do than keep up with which of the 40 million shopping websites' proprietors had been most obnoxious.

The real reason is nearly always one of two things: (1) a site is less important than you think--this is certainly true if you're worried about competitors just because of their websites, or (2) your understanding of "listable" doesn't correspond to the ODP concept (which in my experience is almost certainly true for any website that can be described several times without even impinging on an ODP criterion.)

On this last point, over the last year or so there have been, um, a couple of websites that WERE described by their proprietors in this forum in language that suggested they really WERE listable. And both times I thought, "I'll ask about the site and have a look at it.

But you know what?

BOTH TIMES, the post went on, several lines later, to say that the site was already in the ODP.

Interesting, isn't it, that out of hundreds of adjectives heaped on websites, only two described websites were actually attributed attributes of listability. And both of those were listed.

Now, again, I know there were other sites discussed in this forum that were listable but not listed. (I know this, because for my own research I've asked people for website information.) But ... of all the hundreds of other websites, I have no reason to suppose any particular one is listable. So the information being given is useless to determine which sites should be reviewed.

And that's always the problem in Shopping. How do you pick out the real businesses? You pick what you think is most promising, knowing that even the "most promising" site is still "probably unlistable". So in a rational world, there would probably be a rational bias in favor of looking for sites that are predictably probably listable.

And that's fine, and that's justice. You can't justly ask someone else to give up doing something productive, for something else that wastes their time, just to do something that (by your own logic) would unjustly hurt your competition! And, after all, sites like Yahoo are biassed in favor of commercial listings: for the sake of justice, shouldn't SOMEONE provide a counteractive bias?

So, look at the world's biasses. As someone has said, they add up to cancel out the worst excesses. As someone else has already said, they aren't guaranteed to cancel out perfectly. That's everyone's job -- to see as best we can what biasses are there, and act (possibly in concert with other likeminded people) to correct them by providing the missing information.

Well, I certainly have a list of topics that in MY opinion are under-represented on the web. It doesn't really matter here what they are: I'm not out to recruit or subvert webmasters, as the volunteer communities seem sufficiently well-supplied on that score that I haven't even bothered to offer my help.

However, just at this moment, Shopping information isn't anywhere as high on MY list, as it is on yours. That's OK: I won't ask you to proofread any Natural History, and I'll ignore anyone who asks me to review shopping sites, and we'll all be more productive, as well as more effective at accomplishing our goals.