hutcheson - 9:34 pm on Jul 16, 2007 (gmt 0)

>DMOZ is inundated with submissions and or spam and doesn’t have time to add valuable sites in some areas.

You seem to assuming that DMOZ _has_ a global concept of "valuable site". But it doesn't. It has a global concept of "listable site", and several thousand different personal concepts of "interesting subject."

And, historically speaking, "industrial" categories have been over-represented in webmaster forums vis-a-vis volunteer editor concerns (you might, although I wouldn't, say they are under-represented in volunteer editor interests vis-a-vis the typical webmaster forum participant.

So it's not a matter of "too few" editors in the ODP in general. It's simply a matter of too few surfers interested in that particular topic. And the presence of spam is not necessarily an issue -- a topic may be intrinsically uninteresting, or it may be rendered boring by the presence of large volumes of spam. But remember, "uninteresting" or "interesting" are concepts defined by each editor

And you can't bank on "ODP time" because there isn't any such thing. There is only "individual editor time." The ODP is the union of individual editor interests.

This explains why 4 and 5 are not merely wrong -- they are inoperative. There literally aren't and can't be any common editor interests in that sense. The largest group of editors are American, and couldn't possibly have an interest in making sure that a British manufacturer isn't listed.

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But, in any case, I think you missed my whole point. Nobody disputes that there are listable sites, that have been suggested, and the suggestions are not always looked at immediately. But your proposal doesn't and wouldn't affect that fact at all.

What you proposed was that suggestions from TRUSTED suggestors would receive some sort of priority (or potential priority.) The problem was not that there are no good suggestions. The problem is that there is no class of suggestors that can be procedurally "trusted" -- that is, there is no way of building trust other than by the time-immemorial way: that is, by doing something right over and over until people figure out that you always do it right. And ... people who suggest enough sites to gain that kind of trust (remember, there is no OTHER kind of trust!) can qualify to become editors.

So, there is no need for ANOTHER mechanism to represent the existance of established trust. We have the "editor" mechanism.