gpmgroup - 12:02 am on Jul 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

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.

This particular site isn’t an “industrial” site – In fact it has articles on very big widgets ;-) that most American’s try to see on their tour of the UK, and many if not most people dream of owning at some point in their life.

So to try and use FUD in this way to dismiss the failings of DMOZ is scraping the bottom of the barrel somewhat. :)

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

If there were sufficient editors you would expect these inadequacies to be ironed out.

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.

Has to be the understatement of the year “and the suggestions are not always looked at immediately” cough ;) 4 and a half years :) That's like 30 years in the non internet world LOL

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"

This shows a very closed mind approach. It isn’t about trusting anything implicitly or procedurally, its about establishing possible trust statistically by "grouping submissions from the same source to together”

And in doing so providing a more efficient use of editor’s time to find groups of sites.

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

I have several interests so I looked at the categories for which I know the subjects inside out. These subjects are diverse; I could not realistically apply to be an editor for each of those sections of the tree. I could easily add 10 – 20 sites to several of those categories (Non of which I have any affiliation to or even have websites in those fields)

Out of the sites listed in DMOZ from all of the categories I found 1 site which was worth book marking that I had not seen before. In all of those categories it would be fair to say many of the DMOZ entries were often dated and/or academically light weight.

This isn’t a reflection the quality of editors it is simply the breath of subject matter editors who oversee large sections of the tree need to have to be able add quality sites. Without help they just can not hope to ever find the quality of sites needed to make DMOZ a first or even second point of search for most surfers.

Even with 75,151 editors quoted on the front page and could perhaps be considered misleading? that’s 8 categories each and with perhaps a more realistic “6000” editors that’s almost 100 categories each. (Assuming more than 5900 are actually interested in editing more than a handful of categories :))